LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



Chap. Copyright No.. 

Shelf .....:Ai. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Library of Congress 

Two Copies Received 
AUG 18 1900 

Copyright entry 

SECOND COPY. 

Delivered to 

ORDER DIVISION, 
Allft 25 1900 



Copyright, 1900, by W. B. Conkey Company. 



73599 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE. 

Work 29 

LECTURE II. 
Traffic 79 

LECTURE III. 
War 121 

LECTURE IV. 
The Future of England 175 

Appendix 207 



PREFACE. 



Twenty years ago there was no lovelier piece 
of lowland scenery in South England, nor any 
more pathetic in the world, by its expression 
of sweet human character and life, than that 
immediately bordering on the sources of the 
Wandle, and including the lower moors of 
Addington, and the villages of Beddington 
and Carshalton, with all their pools and 
streams. No clearer nor diviner waters ever 
sang with constant lips of the hand which 
"giveth rain from heaven"; no pastures ever 
lightened in springtime with more passionate 
blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed 
the heart of the passer-by with their pride of 
peaceful gladness — fain-hidden — yet full-con- 
fessed. The place remains, or, until a few- 
months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in 
its larger features ; but, with deliberate mind 
I say, that I have never seen anything so 
ghastly in its inner tragic meaning, — not in 
Pisan Maremma, — not by Campagna tomb, — 

5 



6 PREFACE. 

not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore, 
— as the slow stealing of aspects, of reckless, 
indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate 
sweetness of that English scene: nor is any 
blasphemy or impiety — any frantic saying or 
godless thought — more appalling to me, using 
the best power of judgment I have to discern 
its sense and scope, than the insolent defilings 
of those springs by the human herds that drink 
of them. Just where the welling of stainless 
water, trembling and pure, like a body of 
light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting 
itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, 
through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, 
which it traverses with its deep threads of 
clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, 
starred here and there with white grenouil- 
lette; just in the very rush and murmur of 
the first spreading currents, the human 
wretches of the place last their street and 
house foulness ; heaps of dust and slime, and 
broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid 
clothes; they having neither energy to cart it 
away, nor decency enough to dig it into the 
ground, thus shed into the stream, to diffuse 
what venom of it will float and melt, far away, 
in all places where God meant those waters 
to bring joy and health. And, in a little pool, 



PREFACE. 7 

behind some houses farther in the village, 
where another spring rises, the shattered 
stones of the well, and of the little fretted 
channel which was long ago built and traced 
for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each 
from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and 
scoria, and bricklayers' refuse, on one side, 
which the clean water nevertheless chastises to 
purity ; but it cannot conquer the dead earth 
beyond; and there, circled and coiled under 
festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool 
effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the 
accumulation of indolent years. Half a dozen 
men, with one day's work, could cleanse those 
pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, 
and make every breath of summer air above 
them rich with cool balm ; and every glittering 
wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels, 
from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's 
work is never given, nor will be ; nor will any 
joy be possible to heart of man, forevermore, 
about those wells of English waters. 

When I last left them, I walked up slowly 
through the back streets of Croydon, from the 
old church to the hospital ; and, just on the 
left, before coming up to the crossing of the 
High Street, there was a new public-house built. 
And the front of it was built in so wise man- 



8 PREFACE. 

ner, that a recess of two feet was left below its 
front windows, between them and the street 
pavement — a recess too narrow for any possi- 
ble use (for even if it had been occupied by a 
seat, as in old time it might have been, every- 
body walking along the street would have fal- 
len over the legs of the reposing wayfarers). 
But, by way of making this two feet depth of 
freehold land more expressive of the dignity of 
an establishment for the sale of spirituous 
liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by 
an imposing iron railing, having four or five 
spearheads to the yard of it, and six feet 
high ; containing as much iron and iron- work, 
indeed, as could well be put into the space ; 
and by this stately arrangement, the little 
piece of dead ground within, between wall and 
street, became a protective receptacle of ref- 
use ; cigar ends, and oyster shells, and the like, 
such as an open-handed English street popu- 
lace habitually scatters from its presence, and 
was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary 
methods. Now the iron bars which, uselessly 
(or in great degree worse than uselessly), en- 
closed this bit of ground, and made it pestilent, 
represented a quantity of work which would 
have cleansed the Carshalton pools three times 
over — of work, partly cramped and deadly, in 



PREFACE. 9 

the mine; partly fierce* and exhaustive, at the 
furnace, partly foolish and sedentary, of ill- 
taught students making bad designs; work 
from the beginning to the last fruits of it, and 
in all the branches of it, venomous, deathful, 
and miserable. Now how did it come to pass 
that this work was done instead of the other; 
that the strength and life of the English oper- 
ative were spent in defiling ground, instead of 
redeeming it ; and in producing an entirely (in 
that place) valueless piece of metal, which can 
neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of me- 
dicinal fresh air, and pure water? 

*"A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, 
near Wolverhampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, 
was on duty as the 'keeper' of a blast furnace at Deep- 
field, assisted by John Gardner, aged eighteen, and 
Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained 
tour tons of molten iron, and an equal amount of cin- 
ders, and ought to have been run out at 7.30 p. m. But 
Snape and his mates, engaged in talking and drinking, 
neglected their duty, and, in the meantime, the iron 
rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water 
was contained. Just as the men had stripped, and were 
proceeding to tap the furnace, the water in the pipe, 
converted into steam, burst down its front and let loose 
on them the molten metal, which instantaneously con- 
sumed Gardner; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with 
pain, leaped into the canal and then ran home and fell 
dead on the threshold ; Swift survived to reach the hos- 
pital, where he died, too." 

In further illustration of this matter, I beg the reader 
to look at the article on the "Decay of the English 
Race," in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 17, of this year; 
and at the articles on the "Report of the Thames Com- 
mission," in any journals of the same date. 
2 Crown 



10 PREFACE. 

There is but one reason for it, and at present 
a conclusive one, — that the capitalist can 
charge percentage on the work in the one case, 
and cannot in the other. If, having certain 
funds for supporting labor at my disposal, I pay 
men merely to keep my ground in order, my 
money is, in that function, spent once for all; 
but if I pay them to dig iron out of my ground, 
and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for 
the ground, and percentage both on the man- 
ufacture and the sale, and make my capital 
profitable in these three byways. The greater 
part of the profitable investment of capital in 
the present day, is in operations of this kind, 
in which the public is persuaded to buy some- 
thing of no use to it, on production, or sale, of 
which, the capitalist may charge percentage; 
the said public remaining all the while under 
the persuasion that the percentage thus ob- 
tained are real national gains, whereas, they 
are merely filchings out of partially light pock- 
ets, to swell heavy ones. 

Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron 
railing, to make himself more conspicuous to 
drunkards. The public-house keeper on the 
other side of the way presently buys another 
railing, to out-rail him with. Both are, as to 
their relative attractiveness to customers of 



PREFACE. 11 

taste, just where they were before; but they 
have lost the price of the railings; which they 
must either themselves finally lose, or make 
their aforesaid customers of taste pay, by rais- 
ing the price of their beer, or adulterating it 
Either the publicans, or their customers, are 
thus poorer by precisely what the capitalist 
has gained ; and the value of the work itself, 
meantime, has been lost, to the nation; the 
iron bars in that form and place being wholly 
useless. It is this mode of taxation of the poor 
by the rich which is referred to in the 
text in comparing the modern acquisitive 
power of capital with that of the lance and 
sword ; the only difference being that the levy 
of blackmail in old times was by force, and is 
now by cozening. The old rider and reiver 
frankly quartered himself on the publican for 
the night; the modern one merely makes his 
lance into an iron spike, and persuades his host 
to buy it. One comes as an open robber, the 
other as a cheating pedler ; but the result, to 
the injured person's pocket, is absolutely the 
same. Of course, many useful industries min- 
gle with, and disguise the useless ones; and in 
the habits of energy aroused by the struggle, 
there is a certain direct good. It is far better 
to spend four thousand pounds in making a 



12 PREFACE. 

good gun, and then to blow it to pieces, than 
to pass life in idleness. Only do not let it be 
called "political economy." There is also a 
confused notion in the minds of many persons, 
that the gathering of the property of the poor 
into the hands of the rich does no ultimate 
harm ; since in whosesoever hands it may be, 
it must be spent at last, and thus, they think, 
return to the poor again. This fallacy has 
been again and again exposed ; but grant the 
plea true, and the same apology may, of course, 
be made for blackmail, or any other form of 
robbery. It might be (though practically it 
never is) as advantageous for the nation that 
the robber should have the spending of the 
money he extorts, as that the person robbed 
should have spent it. But this is no excuse 
for the theft. If I were to put a turnpike on 
the road where it passes my own gate, and 
endeavor to exact a shilling from every passen- 
ger, the public would soon do away with my 
gate, without listening to any plea on my part 
that "it was as advantageous to them, in the 
end, that I should spend their shillings, as that 
they themselves should." But if, instead of 
out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only 
persuade them to come in and buy stones, or 
old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my 



PREFACE. 13 

ground, I may rob them to the same extent, 
and be, moreover, thanked as a public bene- 
factor, and promoter of commercial prosperity. 
And this main question for the poor of Eng- 
land — for the poor of all countries — is wholly 
omitted in every common treatise on the sub- 
ject of wealth. Even by the laborers them- 
selves, the operation of capital is regarded only 
in its effect on their immediate interests ; never 
in the far more terrific power of its appoint- 
ment of the kind and the object of labor. It 
matters little, ultimately, how much a laborer 
is paid for making anything; but it matters 
fearfully what the thing is, which he is com- 
pelled to make. If his labor is so ordered as 
to produce food, and fresh air, and fresh water, 
no matter that his wages are low, — the food 
and the fresh air and water will be at last 
there ; and he will at last get them. But if he 
is paid to destroy food and fresh air or to pro- 
duce iron bars instead of them, — the food and 
air will finally not be there, and he will not get 
them, to his great and final inconvenience. So 
that, conclusively, in political as in household 
economy, the great question is, not so much 
what money you have in your pocket, as what 
you will buy with it, and do with it. 

I have been long accustomed, as all men en- 



14 PREFACE. 

gaged in work of investigation must be, to hear 
my statements laughed at for years, before 
they are examined or believed ; and I am gen- 
erally content to wait the public's time. But it 
has not been without displeased surprise that I 
have found myself totally unable, as yet, by 
any repetition, or illustration, to force this 
plain thought into my readers* heads, — that 
the wealth of nations, as of men, consists 
in substance, not in ciphers; and that the real 
good of all work, and of all commerce, depends 
on the final worth of the thing you make, or 
get by it. This is a practical enough state- 
ment, one would think, but the English public 
has been so possessed by its modern school of 
economists with the notion that Business is 
always good, whether it be busy in mischief or 
m benefit, and that buying and selling are 
always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth 
of what you buy or sell, — that it seems impos- 
sible to gain so much as a patient hearing for 
any inquiry respecting the substantial result 
of our eager modern labors. I have never felt 
more checked by the sense of this impossibility 
than in arranging the heads of the following 
three lectures, which, though delivered at con- 
siderable intervals of time, and in different 
places, were not prepared without reference to 



PREFACE. 15 

each other. Their connection would, how- 
ever, have been made far more distinct, if I 
had not been prevented, by what I feel to be 
another great difficulty in addressing English 
audiences, from enforcing, with any decision, 
the common, and to me the most important, 
part of their subjects. I chiefly desired (as I 
have just said) to question my hearers — oper- 
atives, merchants, and soldiers, as to the ulti- 
mate meaning of the business they had in 
hand ; and to know from them what they ex- 
pected or intended their manufacture to come 
to, their selling to come to, and their killing to 
come to. That appeared the first point need- 
ing determination before I could speak to them 
with any real utility or effect. V You crafts- 
men — salesmen — swordsmen — do but tell me 
clearly what you want ; then if I can say any- 
thing to help you, I will; and if not, I will 
account to you as I best may for my inability. " 
But in order to put this question into any terms, 
one had first of all to face the difficulty just 
spoken of — to me for the present insuperable 
— the difficulty of knowing whether to address 
one's audience as believing, or not believing, 
in any other world than this. For if you ad- 
dress any average modern English company as 
believing in an Eternal life, and endeavor to 



16 PREFACE. 

draw any conclusions, from this assumed be- 
lief, as to their present business, they will 
forthwith tell you that what you say is very 
beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on the 
contrary, you frankly address them as unbe- 
lievers of Eternal life, and try to draw any 
consequences from that unbelief — they imme- 
diately hold you for an accursed person, and 
shake off the dust from their feet at you. And 
the more I thought over what I had got to say, 
the less I found I could say it, without some 
reference to this intangible or intractable part 
of the subject. It made all the difference, in 
asserting any principle of war, whether one 
assumed that a discharge of artillery would 
merely knead down a certain quantity of red 
clay into a level lie, as in a brickfield; or 
whether, out of every separately Christian- 
named portion of the ruinous heap, there went 
out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of bat- 
tle, some astonished condition of soul, unwil- 
lingly released. It made all the difference, in 
speaking of the possible range of commerce, 
whether one assumed that all bargains related 
only to visible property — or whether property, 
for the present invisible, but nevertheless real, 
was elsewhere purchasable on other terms. It 
made all the difference, in addressing a body 



PREFACE. 17 

of men subject to considerable hardship, and 
having to find some way out of it — whether 
one could confidently say to them, "My friends 
— you have only to die, and all will be right;" 
or whether one had any secret misgiving that 
such advice was more blessed to him that 
gave, than to him that took it. And therefore 
the deliberate reader will find, throughout 
these lectures, a hesitation in driving points 
home, and a pausing short of conclusions which 
he will feel I would fain have come to ; hesita- 
tion which arises wholly from this uncertainty 
of my hearers' temper. For I do not now 
speak, nor have I ever spoken, since the time of 
first forward youth, in any proselyting temper, 
as desiring to persuade any one of what, in 
such matters, I thought myself; but, whomso- 
ever I venture to address, I take for the time 
his creed as I find it : and endeavor to push it 
into such vital fruit as it seems capable of. 
Thus, it is a creed with a great part of the ex- 
isting English people, that they are in posses- 
sion of a book which tells them, straight from 
the lips of God, all they ought to do, and need 
to know. I have read that book, with as much 
care as most of them, for some forty years; 
and am thankful that, on those who trust it, I 
can press its pleadings. My endeavor has been 
2 



18 PREFACE. 

uniformly to make them trust it more deeply 
than they do; trust it, not in their own favor- 
ite verses only, but in the sum of all ; trust it 
not as a fetish or talisman, which they are to 
be saved by daily repetitions of; but as a Cap- 
tain's order, to be heard and obeyed at their 
peril. I was always encouraged by supposing 
my hearers to hold such belief. To these, if to 
any, I once had hope of addressing, with ac- 
ceptance, words which insisted on the guilt of 
pride, and the futility of avarice; from these, 
if from any, I once expected ratification of a 
political economy, which asserted that the life 
was more than the meat, and the body than 
raiment; and these, it once seemed tome, I 
might ask, without accusation of fanaticism, 
not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the 
bestowal of their heart's treasure, to separate 
themselves from the crowd of whom it is writ- 
ten, M After all these things do the Gentiles 
seek." 

It cannot however, be assumed, with any 
semblance of reason, that a general audience 
is now wholly, or even in majority, composed 
of these religious persons. A large portion 
must always consist of men who admit no such 
creed; or who, at least, are inaccessible to 
appeals founded on it. And as, with the so- 



PREFACE. 19 

called Christian, I desired to plead for honest 
declaration and fulfilment of his belief in life, 
— with the so-called infidel, I desired to plead 
for an honest declaration and fulfilment of his 
belief in death. The dilemma is inevitably. 
Men must either hereafter live, or hereafter 
die; fate may be bravely met, and conduct 
wisely ordered, on either expectation; but 
never in hesitation between ungrasped hope, 
and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in 
immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for 
death; and in mortality, so far as tQ avoid 
preparation for anything after death. Where- 
as, a wise man will at least hold himself pre- 
pared for one or other of two events, of which 
one or other is inevitable ; and will have all 
things in order, for his sleep, or in readiness, 
for his awakening. 

Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble 
judgment, if he determine to put them in 
order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is 
indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as far 
as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few 
Christians so convinced of the splendor of the 
rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier 
when their friends are called to those man- 
sions, than they would have been if the Queen 
had sent for them to live at court; nor has the 



20 PREFACE. 

Church's most ardent " desire to depart, and be 
with Christ," ever cured it of the singular 
habit of putting on mourning for every person 
summoned to such departure. On the con- 
trary, a brave belief in death has been assur- 
edly held by many not ignoble persons, and it 
is a sign of the last depravity in the Church 
itself, when it assumes that such a belief is in- 
consistent with either purity of character, or 
energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, 
to any rational person, a conclusive reason for 
wasting the space of it which may be granted 
him ; nor does the anticipation of death to-mor- 
row suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the 
expediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach 
that there is no device in the grave, may in- 
deed make the deviceless person more con- 
tented in his dulness; but it will make the de- 
viser only more earnest in devising ; nor is hu- 
man conduct likely, in every case, to be purer, 
under the conviction that all its evil may in a 
moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing 
in a moment redeemed ; and that the sigh of 
repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, 
will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets 
its pain, — than it may be under the sterner, 
and to many not unwise minds, more probable, 
apprehension, that "what a man soweth that 



PREFACE. 21 

shall he also reap," — or others reap, — when 
he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no 
more in darkness, but lies down therein. 

But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bit- 
terness of soul, or the offence given by the con- 
duct of those who claim higher hope, may have 
rendered this painful creed the only possible 
one, there is an appeal to be made, more secure 
in its ground than any which can be addressed 
to happier persons. I would fain, if I might 
off encelessly, have spoken to them as if none 
others heard; and have said thus: Hear me, 
you dying men, who will soon be deaf forever. 
For these others, at your right hand and your 
left, who look forward to a state of infant exist- 
ence, in which all their errors will be overruled, 
and all their faults forgiven ; for these, who, 
stained and blackened in the battle-smoke of 
mortality, have but to dip themselves for an 
instant in the font of death, and to rise re- 
newed of plumage, as a dove that is covered 
with silver, and her feathers like gold; for 
these, indeed, it may be permissible to waste 
their numbered moments, through faith in a 
future of innumerable hours ; to these, in their 
weakness, it may be conceded that they should 
tamper with sin which can only bring forth 
fruit of righteousness, and profit by the iniq- 



22 PREFACE. 

uity which, one day, will be remembered no 
more. In them, it may be no sign of hardness 
of heart to neglect the poor, over whom they 
know their Master is watching; and to leave 
those to perish temporarily, who cannot perish 
eternally. But, for you, there is no such hope, 
and, therefore, no such excuse. This fate 
which you ordain for the wretched, you believe 
to be all their inheritance ; you may crush 
them, before the moth, and they will never 
rise to rebuke you; — their breath, which fails 
for lack of food, once expiring, will never be 
recalled to whisper against you a word of ac- 
cusing; — they and you, as you think, shall lie 
down together in the dust, and the worms 
cover you; — and for them there shall be no 
consolation, and on you no vengeance, — only 
the question murmured above your grave: 
" Who shall repay him what he hath done?" 
Is it, therefore, easier for you in your heart to 
inflict the sorrow for which there is no remedy ? 
Will you take, wantonly, this little all of his 
life from your poor brother, and make his brief 
hours long to him with pain? Will you be 
readier to the injustice which can never be 
redressed ; and niggardly of mercy which you 
can bestow but once, and which, refusing, you 
refuse forever? I think better of you, even of 



PREFACE. 23 

the most selfish, than that you would do this, 
well understood. And for yourselves, it seems 
to me, the question becomes not less grave, in 
these curt limits. If your life were but a fever 
fit, — the madness of a night, whose follies were 
all to be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter 
little how you fretted away the sickly hours, — 
what toys you snatched at, or let fall, — what 
visions you followed wistfully with the de- 
ceived eyes of sleepless phrenzy. Is the earth 
only an hospital? Play, if you care to play, on 
the floor of the hospital dens. Knit its straw 
into what crowns please you ; gather the dust 
of it for treasure, and die rich in that, clutch- 
ing at the black motes in the air with your 
dying hands; — and yet, it may be well with 
you. But if this life be no dream, and the 
world no hospital ; if all the peace and power 
and joy you can ever win, must be won now, 
and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never; 
— will you still, throughout the puny totality 
of your life, weary yourselves in the fire for 
vanity? If there is no rest which remaineth 
for you, is there none you might presently 
take? was this grass of the earth made green 
for your shroud only, not for your bed? and can 
you never lie down upon it, but only under it? 
The heathen, to whose creed you have re- 



24 PREFACE. 

turned, thought not so. They knew that life 
brought its contest, but they expected from it 
also the crown of all contest : No proud one ! 
no jeweled circlet flaming through Heaven 
above the height of the unmerited throne; 
only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the 
tired brow, through a few years of peace. It 
should have been of gold, they thought ; but 
Jupiter was poor; this was the best the god 
could give them. Seeking a greater than this, 
they had known it a mockery. Not in war, not 
in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any hap- 
piness to be found for them — only in kindly 
peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to 
be of wild olive, mark you; — the tree that 
grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no 
vivid bloom, no verdure of branch ; only with 
soft snow of blossom, and scarcely fulfilled 
fruit, mixed with gray leaf and thorn-set stem ; 
no fastening of diadem for you but with such 
sharp embroidery! But this, such as it is, you 
may win while yet you live; type of great 
honor and sweet rest. Free-heartedness, and 
graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and re- 
quited love, and the sight of the peace of 
others, and the ministry to their pain ; — these, 
and the blue sky above you, and the sweet 
waters and flowers of the earth beneath ; and 



PREFACE. 25 

mysteries and presences, innumerable, of liv- 
ing things, — these may yet be here your 
riches; tmtormenting and divine; serviceable 
for the life that now is ; nor, it may be, with- 
out promise of that which is to come. 



LECTURE I. 

WORK. 



27 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 



LECTURE I. 

WORK. 

(Delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at 
Camberwell.) 

My Friends, — I have not come among you 
to-night to endeavor to give you an entertain- 
ing lecture; but to tell you a few plain facts, 
and ask you some plain, but necessary ques- 
tions. I have seen and known too much of the 
struggle for life among our laboring popula- 
tion, to feel at ease, even under any circum- 
stances, in inviting them to dwell on the trivi- 
alities of my own studies, but, much more, as 
I meet to-night, for the first time, the mem- 
bers of a working Institute established in the 
district in which I have passed the greater part 
of my life, I am desirous that we should at 
once understand each other, on graver matters. 
I would fain tell you, with what feelings, 
and with what hope, I regard this Institution, 
as one of many such, now happily established 

29 



30 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

throughout England, as well as in other 
countries, — Institutions which are preparing 
the way for a great change in all the circum- 
stances of industrial life ; but of which the suc- 
cess must wholly depend upon our clearly 
understanding the circumstances and neces- 
sary limits of this change. No teacher can 
truty promote the cause of education, until 
he knows the conditions of the life for which 
that education is to prepare his pupil. And 
the fact that he is called upon to address you, 
nominally, as a "Working Class," must com- 
pel him, if he is in any wise earnest or thought- 
ful, to inquire in the outset, on what you 
yourselves suppose this class distinction has 
been founded in the past, and must be founded 
in the future. The manner of the amuse- 
ment, and the matter of the teaching, which 
any of us can offer you, must depend wholly 
on our first understanding from you, whether 
you think the distinction heretofore drawn 
between working men and others, is truly or 
falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands? 
do you wish it to be modified? or do you think 
the object of education is to efface it, and 
make us forget it forever? 

Let me make myself more distinctly under- 
stood. We call this — you and I — a "Working 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 31 

Men's" Institute, and our college in London, 
a " Working Men's" College. Now, how do 
you consider that these several institutes differ, 
or ought to differ, from "idle men's" institutes 
and "idle men's" colleges? Or by what other 
word than "idle" shall I distinguish those 
whom the happiest and wisest of working men 
do not object to call the "Upper Classes"? 
Are there really upper classes, — are there 
lower? How much should they always be 
elevated, how much always depressed? And, 
gentlemen and ladies — I pray those of you who 
are here to forgive me the offence there may 
be in what I am going to say. It is not I who 
wish to say it. Bitter voices say it: voices of 
battle and of famine through all the world, 
which must be heard some day, whoever keeps 
silence. Neither is it to you specially that I 
say it. I am sure that most now present know 
their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better 
perhaps than I do mine. But I speak to you 
as representing your whole class, which errs, 
I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not 
therefore the less terribly. Wilful error is 
limited by the will, but what limit it there to 
that of which we are unconscious? 

Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to 
these workmen, and ask them, also, as repre- 



32 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

senting a great multitude, what they think the 
"upper classes" are, and ought to be, in rela- 
tion to them. Answer, you workmen who are 
here, as you would among yourselves, frankly ; 
and tell me how you would have me call those 
classes. Am I to call them — would you think 
me right in calling them — the idle classes? I 
think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and 
as if I were not treating my subject honestly, 
or speaking from my heart, if I went on under 
the supposition that all rich people were idle. 
You would be both unjust and unwise if you 
allowed me to say that; — not less unjust than 
the rich people who say that all the poor are 
idle, and will never work if they can help it, 
or more than they can help it. 

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle 
poor and idle rich ; and there are busy poor 
and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if 
he had ten thousand a year; and many a man 
of large fortune is busier than his errand-boy, 
and never would think of stopping in the street 
to play marbles. So that, in a large view, the 
distinction between workers and idlers, as 
between knaves and honest men, runs through 
the very heart and innermost economies of 
men of all ranks and in all positions. There 
is a working class — strong and happy — among 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 33 

both rich and poor; there is an idle class — 
weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich 
and poor. And the worst of the misunder- 
standings arising between the two orders come 
of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class 
habitually contemplate the foolish of the other. 
If the busy rich people watched and rebuked 
the idle rich people, all would be right ; and if 
the busy poor people watched and rebuked 
the idle poor people, all would be right. But 
each class has a tendency to look for the 
faults of the other. A hard-working man of 
property is particularly offended by an idle 
beggar, and an orderly, but poor, workman 
is naturally intolerant of the licentious luxury 
of the rich. And what is severe judgment in 
the minds of the just men of either class, be- 
comes fierce enmity in the unjust — but among 
the unjust only. None but the dissolute 
among the poor look upon the rich as their 
natural enemies, or desire to pillage their 
house and divide their property. None but 
the dissolute among the rich speak in oppro- 
brious terms of the vices and follies of the 
poor. 

There is, then, no class distinction between 
idle and industrious people ; and I am going 
to-night to speak only of the industrious. The 

3 Crovvn 



34 THE CROWx\ T OF WILD OLIVE. 

idle people we will put out of our thoughts at 
once — they are mere nuisances — what ought to 
be done with them, we'll talk of at another 
time. But there are class distinctions among 
the industrious themselves; — tremendous dis- 
tinctions, which rise and fall to every degree 
in the infinite thermometer of human pain and 
of human power — distinctions of high and low, 
of lost and won, to the whole reach of man's 
soul and body. 

These separations we will study, and the 
laws of them, among energetic men only, who, 
whether they work or whether they play, put 
their strength into the work, and their 
strength into the game; being in the full sense 
of the word "industrious/' one way or another 
— with a purpose, or without. And these dis- 
tinctions are mainly four : 

I. Between those who work, and those who 
play. 

II. Between those who produce the means 
of life, and those who consume them. 

III. Between those who work with the head, 
and those who work with the hand. 

IV. Between those who work wisely, and 
who work foolishly. 

For easier memory, let us say we are going 
to oppose, in our examination, — 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 35 

I. Work to play ; 
II. Production to consumption ; 

III. Head to hand ; and, 

IV. Sense to nonsense. 

I. First, then, of the distinction between 
the classes who work and the classes who play. 
Of course we must agree upon a definition of 
these terms, — work and play, — before going 
farther. Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety 
of definition, but for plain use of the words, 
"play" is an exertion of body or mind, made 
to please ourselves, and with no determined 
end ; and work is a thing done because it ought 
to be done, and with a determined end. You 
play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance. 
That is as hard work as anything else; but it 
amuses you, and it has no result but the 
amusement. If it were done as an ordered 
form of exercise, for health's sake, it would 
become work directly. So, in like manner, 
whatever we do to please ourselves, and only 
for the sake of the pleasure, not for an ulti- 
mate object, is "play," the "pleasing thing," 
not the useful thing. Play may be useful in 
a secondary sense (nothing is indeed more 
useful or necessary) but the use of it depends 
on its being spontaneous. 

Let us, then, inquire together what sort of 



95 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

games the playing class in England spend 
their lives in playing at. 

The first of all English games is making 
money. That is an all-absorbing game and 
we knock each other down oftener in playing 
at that than at foot-ball, or any other roughest 
sport; and it is absolutely without purpose; 
no one who engages heartily in that game ever 
inows why. Ask a great money-maker what 
he wants to do with his money — he never 
knows. He doesn't make it to do anything 
with it. He gets it only that he may get it. 
45 What will you make of what you have got?" 
you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just 
as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no 
use in the runs, but to get more of them than 
other people is the game. And there's no use 
in the money, but to have more of it than 
other people is the game. So all that great 
foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, 
smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of ferment- 
ing brickwork, pouring out poison at every 
pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a 
street of it! It is a great city of play; very 
nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. 
It is only Lord's cricket ground without the 
turf, — a huge billiard table without the cloth, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 37 

and with pockets as deep as the bottomless 
pit ; but mainly a billiard table, after all. 

Well, the first great English game is this 
playing at counters. It differs from the rest 
in that it appears always to be producing 
money, while every other game is expensive. 
But it does not always produce money. There's 
a great difference between 44 winning* ' money 
and "making" it ; a great difference between 
getting it out of another man's pocket into 
ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by 
no means the same thing as making it; the 
tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint: and 
much of the apparent gain (so called), in com- 
merce, is only a form of taxation on carriage 
or exchange. 

Our next great English game, however, 
hunting and shooting, is costly altogether ; and 
how much we are fined for it annually in land, 
horses, gamekeepers, and game laws, and all 
else that accompanies that beautiful and special 
English game, I will not endeavor to count 
now : but note only that, except for exercise, 
this is not merely a useless game, but a deadly 
one, to all connected with it. For through 
horse-racing, you get every form of what the 
higher classes everywhere call "Play," in dis- 
tinction from all other plays; that is — gam- 



38 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

bling; by no means a beneficial or recreative 
game : and, through game-preserving, you get 
also some curious laying out of ground; that 
beautiful arrangement of dwelling-house for 
man and beast, by which we have grouse and 
blackcock — so many brace to the acre, and 
men and women — so many brace to the garret. 
I often wonder what the angelic builders and 
surveyors — the angelic builders who build the 
"many mansions" up above there; and the 
angelic surveyors, who measured that four- 
square city with their measuring reeds — I 
wonder what they think, or are supposed to 
think, of the laying out of ground by this 
nation, which has set itself, as it seems, 
literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather 
fact for word, in the persons of those poor 
whom its Master left to represent him, what 
that Master said of himself — that foxes and 
birds had homes, but He none. 

Then, next to the gentleman's game of 
hunting, we must put the ladies' game of 
dressing. It is not the cheapest of games. I 
saw a brooch at a jeweler's in Bond Street a 
fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and without 
any singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000/. 
And I wish I could tell you what this "play" 
costs, altogether, in England, France, and 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 39 

Russia annually. But it is a pretty game, and 
on certain terms, I like it; nay, I don't see it 
played quite as much as I would fain have it. 
You ladies like to lead the fashion: — by all 
means lead it — lead it thoroughly, lead it far 
enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress 
everybody else nicely. Lead the fashions for 
the poor first ; make them look well, and you 
yourselves will look, in ways of which you 
have now no conception, all the better. The 
fashions you have set for some time among 
your peasantry are not pretty ones; their 
doublets are too irregularly slashed, and the 
wind blows too frankly through them. 

Then there are other games, wild enough, 
as I could show you if I had time. 

There's playing at literature, and playing at 
art — very different both, from working at lit- 
erature, or working at art, but I've no time to 
speak of these. I pass to the greatest of all — 
the play of plays, the great gentleman's game, 
which ladies like them best to play at, — the 
game of War. It is entrancingly pleasant to 
the imagination; the facts of it, not always so 
pleasant. We dress for it, however, more 
finely than for any other sport ; and go out to 
it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt, but in 
scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colors: 



40 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

of course we could fight better in gray, and 
without feathers; but all nations have agreed 
that it is good to be well dressed at this play. 
Then the bats and balls are very costly; our 
English and French bats, with the balls and 
wickets, even those which we don't make any 
use of, costing, I suppose, now about fifteen 
millions of money annually to each nation ; all 
of which you know is paid for by hard labor- 
er's work in the furrow and furnace. A costly 
game — not to speak of its consequences; I will 
say at present nothing of these. The mere 
immediate cost of all these plays is what I 
want you to consider; they all cost deadly 
work somewhere, as many of us know too 
well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight fails over 
the diamonds ; the weaver , whose arm fails over 
the web ; the iron-forger, whose breath fails 
before the furnace— they know what work is — 
they, who have all the work, and none of the 
play, except a kind they have named for them- 
selves down in the black north country, where 
"play" means being laid up by sickness. It is 
a pretty example for philologists, of varying 
dialect, this change in the sense of the word 
"play," as used in the black country of Bir- 
mingham, and the red and black country of 
Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentle- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 41 

women, of England, who think "one moment 
unamused a misery, not made for feeble man," 
this is what you have brought the word 
"play" to mean, in the heart of merry Eng- 
land! You may have your fluting and piping; 
but there are sad children sitting in the mar- 
ket-place, who indeed cannot say to you, "We 
have piped unto you, and ye have not danced:" 
but eternally shall say to you, ' ' We have 
mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. " 
This, then, is the first distinction between 
the "upper and lower" classes. And this is 
one which is by no means necessary; which 
indeed must, in process of good time, be by 
all honest men's consent abolished. Men will 
be taught that an existence of play, sustained 
by the blood of other creatures, is a good ex- 
istence for gnats and sucking fish; but not for 
men : that neither days, nor lives, can be made 
holy by doing nothing in them : that the best 
prayer at the beginning of a day is that we 
may not lose its moments; and the best grace 
before meat, the consciousness that we have 
justly earned our dinner. And when we have 
this much of plain Christianity preached to us 
again, and enough respect what we regard as 
inspiration, as not to think that "Son, go work 
to-day in my vineyard," means "Fool, go play 

i Crown 



42 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

to-day in my vineyard," we shall all be work- 
ers, in one way or another; and this much at 
least of the distinction between 4t tipper" and 
44 lower" forgotten. 

II. I pass then to our second distinction ; 
between the rich and poor, between Dives and 
Lazarus, — distinctions which exist more 
sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever in the 
world, Pagan or Christian, till now. I will put 
it sharply before you, to begin with, merely 
by reading two paragraphs which I cut from 
two papers that lay on my breakfast table on 
the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. 
The piece about the rich Russian at Paris is 
commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for 
fifteen francs, — 12s. 6d. y — is nothing for a rich 
man to give for a couple of peaches, out of 
season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on 
the same day are worth putting side by side. 

44 Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, 
and, with your permission, we will call him 
Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime; art 
is considered in that toilet, the harmony of 
color respected, the chiar' oscuro evident in 
well-selected contrast. In manners he is dig- 
nified — nay, perhaps apathetic; nothing dis- 
turbs the placid serenity of that calm exterior. 
One day our friend breakfasted chez Bignon. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 43 

When the bill came he read, 'Two peaches, 
15L * He paid. Peaches scarce, I presume? 
was his sole remark. 'No, sir,' replied the 
waiter, 'but Teufelskines are.' " — Telegraph, 
November 15, 1864. 

"Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a 
woman, passing a dung heap in the stone yard 
near the recently-erected almshouses in Shad- 
well Gap, High Street, Shadwell, called the 
attention of a Thames police-constable to a 
man in a sitting position on the dung heap, 
and said she was afraid he was dead. Her 
fears proved to be true. The wretched creat- 
ure appeared to have been dead several hours. 
He had perished of cold and wet, and the rain 
had been beating down on him all night. The 
deceased was a bone-picker. He was in the 
lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and half- 
starved. The police had frequently driven 
him away from the stone yard, between sunset 
and sunrise, and told him to go home. He 
selected a most desolate spot for his wretched 
death. A penny and some bones were found 
in his pockets. The deceased was between 
fifty and sixty years of age. Inspector Rob- 
erts, of the K division, has given directions for 
inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses 
respecting the deceased, to ascertain his 



U THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

identity if possible. — Morning Post, Novem- 
ber 25, 1864. 

You have the separation thus in brief com- 
pass; and I want you to take notice of the "a 
penny and some bones were found in his 
pockets," and to compare it with this third 
statement, from the Telegraph of January 16th 
of this year: — 

4 'Again, the dietary scale for adult and juve- 
nile paupers was drawn up by the most con- 
spicuous political economists in England. It 
is low in quantity, but it is sufficient to support 
nature; yet within ten years of the passing of 
the Poor Law Act, we heard of the paupers in 
the Andover Union gnawing the scraps of pu- 
trid flesh and sucking the marrow from the 
bones of horses which they were employed to 
crush.' ' 

You see my reason for thinking that our 
Lazarus of Christianity has some advantage 
over the Jewish one. Jewish Lazarus ex- 
pected, or at least prayed, to be fed with 
crumbs from the rich man's table; but our 
Lazarus is fed with crumbs from the dog's 
table. 

Now this distinction between rich and poor 
rests on two bases. Within its proper limits, 
on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 45 

necessary ; beyond them, on a basis unlawful, 
and everlastingly corrupting the frame-work 
of society. The lawful basis of wealth is, 
that a man who works should be paid the fair 
value of his work ; and if he does not choose 
to spend it to-day, he should have free leave 
to keep it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an 
industrious man working daily, and laying by 
daily, attains at last the possession of an accu- 
mulated sum of wealth, to which he has abso- 
lute right. The idle person who will not work 
and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, 
at the end of the same time will be doubly 
poor — poor in possession, and dissolute in 
moral habit ; and he will then naturally covet 
the money which the other has saved. And if 
he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob 
him of his well-earned wealth, there is no 
more any motive for saving, or any reward for 
good conduct ; and all society is thereupon dis- 
solved, or exists only in systems of rapine. 
Therefore the first necessity of social life is 
the clearness of national conscience in enforc- 
ing the law — that he should keep who has 
justly earned. 

That law, I say, is the proper basis of dis- 
tinction between rich and poor. But there is 
also a false basis of distinction ; namely, the 



46 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

power held over those who earn wealth by 
those who levy or exact it. There will be 
always a number of men who would fain set 
themselves to the accumulation of wealth as 
the sole object of their lives. Necessarily, 
that class of men is an uneducated class, in- 
ferior in intellect, and more or less cowardly. 
It is physically impossible for a well-edu- 
cated, intellectual, or brave man to make 
money the chief object of his thoughts; as 
physically impossible as it is for him to make 
his dinner the principal object of them. All 
healthy people like their dinners, but their 
dinner is not the main object of their lives. 
So all healthy minded people like making 
money — ought to like it, and to enjoy the sen- 
sation of winning it ; but the main object of 
their life is not money; it is something better 
than money. A good soldier, for instance, 
mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is 
glad of his pay — very properly so, and justly 
grumbles when you keep him ten years with- 
out it — still, his main notion of life is to win 
battles, not to be paid for winning them. So 
of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and bap- 
tismal fees, of course; but yet, if they are 
brave and well educated, the pew-rent is not 
the sole object of their lives, and the baptismal 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 47 

fee is not the sole purpose of the baptism ; the 
clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and 
preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of 
doctors. They like fees no doubt, — ought to 
like them; yet if they are brave and well 
educated, the entire object of their lives is not 
fees. They, on the whole, desire to cure the 
sick; and, — if they are good doctors, and 
the choice were fairly put to them,— would 
rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, 
than kill him, and get it. And so with all 
other brave and rightly trained men; their 
work is first, their fee second — very important 
always, but still second. But in every nation, 
as I said, there are a vast class who are ill- 
educated, cowardly, and more or less stupid. 
And with these people, just as certainly the 
fee is first, and the work second, as with brave 
people the work is first and the fee second. 
And this is no small distinction. It is the 
whole distinction in man ; distinction between 
life and death in him, between heaven and 
hell for him. You cannot serve two masters; 
— you must serve one or other. If your work 
is first with you, and your fee second, work is 
your master, and the lord of work, who is 
God. But if your fee is first with you, and 
your work second, fee is your master, and the 



48 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

lord of fee, who is the Devil; and not only 
the Devil, but the lowest of devils— the 4 'least 
erected fiend that fell. " So there you have 
it in the briefest terms ; Work first — you are 
God's servants; Fee first — you are the 
Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now and 
ever, believe me, whether you serve Him who 
has on His vesture and thigh written, "King 
of Kings, ' ' and whose service is perfect free- 
dom ; or him on whose vesture and thigh the 
name is written, "Slave of Slaves," and whose 
service is perfect slavery. 

However, in every nation there are, and 
must always be a certain number of these 
Fiend's servants, who have it principally for 
the object of their lives to make money. They 
are always, as I said, more or less stupid, and 
cannot conceive of anything else so nice as 
money. Stupidity is always the basis of the 
Judas bargain. We do great injustice to Iscar- 
iot, in thinking him wicked above all common 
wickedness. He was only a common money- 
lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn't under- 
stand Christ; — couldn't make out the worth of 
Him, or meaning of Him. He was horror- 
struck when he found that Christ would be 
killed; threw his money away instantly, and 
hanged himself. How many of our present 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 49 

money-seekers, think you, would have the 
grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed? 
But Judas was a common, selfish, muddle] 
headed, pilfering fellow ; his hand always in 
the bag of the poor, not caring for them. He 
didn't understand Christ; — yet believed in 
Him, much more than most of us do; had seen 
Him do miracles, thought He was quite strong 
enough to shift for Himself, and he, Judas, 
might as well make his own little by-perquis- 
ites out of the affair. Christ would come out 
of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. 
Now, that is the money-seeker's idea, all over 
the world. He doesn't hate Christ, but can't 
understand Him — doesn't care for Him — sees 
no good in that benevolent business ; makes his 
own little object out of it at all events, come 
what will. And thus, out of every mass of 
men, you have a certain number of bag-men — 
your "fee first" men, whose main object is to 
make money. And they do make it — make it 
in all sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by the weight 
and force of money itself, or what is called 
the power of capital ; that is to say, the power 
which money, once obtained, has over the labor 
of the poor, so that the capitalist can take all 
its produce to himself, except the laborer's 
food. That is the modern Judas' way of "car- 



50 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

rying the bag," and bearing what is put 
therein. 

Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair 
advantage? Has not the man who has worked 
for the money a right to use it as he best can? 
No; in this respect, money is now exactly what 
mountain promontories over public roads 
were in old times. The barons fought for 
them fairly: — the strongest and cunningest got 
them; then fortified them; and made every 
one who passed below pay toll. Well, capital 
now is exactly what crags were then. Men 
fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, 
though it is more than we ought) for their 
money ; but, once having got it, the fortified 
millionaire can make everybody who passes 
below pay toll to his million, and build another 
tower of his money castle. And I can tell 
you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer 
now quite as much from the bag-baron, as 
ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and 
crags have just the same result on rags. I 
have not time, however, to-night to show you 
in how many ways the power of capital is 
unjust; but this one great principle I have to 
assert — you will find it quite indisputably true 
— that whenever money is the principal object 
of life with either man or nation, it is both got 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 51 

ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in the 
getting and spending ; but when it is not the 
principal object, it and all other things will be 
well got, and well spent. And here is the 
test, with every man, of whether money is the 
principal object with him, or not. If in mid- 
life he could pause and say, "Now I have 
enough to live upon, I'll live upon it; and 
having well earned it, I will also well spend it, 
and go out of the world poor, as I came into 
it," then money is not principal with him; but 
if, having enough to live upon in the manner 
befitting his character and rank, he still wants 
to make more, and to die rich, then money is 
the principal object with him, and it becomes 
a curse to himself, and generally to those who 
spend it after him. For you know it must be 
spent some day ; the only question is whether 
the man who makes it shall spend it, or some 
one else. And generally it is better for the 
maker to spend it, for he will know best its 
value and use. This is the true law of life. 
And if a man does not choose thus to spend his 
money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and 
the worst thing he can generally do is to lend 
it; for borrowers are nearly always ill- spend- 
ers, and it is with lent money that all evil is 
mainly done and all unjust war protracted. 



52 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

For observe what the real fact is, respecting 
loans to foreign military governments, and 
how strange it is. If your little boy came to 
you to ask for money to spend in squibs and 
crackers, you would think twice before you gave 
it him ; and you would have some idea that it 
was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fire- 
works, even though he did no mischief with it. 
But the Russian children, and Austrian chil- 
dren, come to you, borrowing money, not to 
spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and 
bayonets to attack you in India with, and to 
keep down all noble life in Italy with, and to 
murder Polish women and children with ; and 
that you will give at once, because they payyou 
interest for it. Now, in order to pay you that 
interest, they must tax every working peasant 
in their dominions; and on that work you live. 
You therefore at once rob the Austrian peas- 
ant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, 
and you live on the produce of the theft, and 
the bribe for the assassination! That is the 
broad fact — that is the practical meaning of 
your foreign loans, and of most large interest 
of money; and then you quarrel with Bishop 
Colenso, forsooth, as if he denied the Bible, 
and you believed it! though, wretches as you 
are, every deliberate act of your lives is a new 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 53 

defiance of its primary orders; and as if, for 
most of the rich men of England at this 
moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as 
the best thing at least for them, that the Bible 
should not be true, since against them these 
words are written in it: "The rust of your 
gold and silver shall be a witness against you, 
and shall eat your flesh, as it were fire. " 

III. I pass now to our third condition of sep- 
aration, between the men who work with the 
hand, and those who work with the head. 

And here we have at last an inevitable dis- 
tinction. There must be work done by the 
arms, or none of us could live. There must be 
work done by the brains, or the life we get 
would not be worth having. And the same 
men cannot do both. There is rough work to 
be done, and rough men must do it ; there is 
gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must 
do it ; and it is physically impossible that one 
class should do, or divide, the work of the 
other. And it is of no use to try to conceal 
this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk 
to the workman about the honorableness of 
manual labor, and the dignity of humanity. 
That is a grand old proverb of Sancho Panza's, 
44 Fine words butter no parsnips ;" and I can tell 
you that, all over England just now, you 



54 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

gentlemen are buying a great deal too much 
butter at that dairy. Rough work, honorable 
or not, takes the life out of us: and the man 
who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all 
day, or driving an express train against the 
north wind all night, or holding a collier's 
helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling 
white-hot iron at a furnace mouth, that man is 
not the same at the end of his day, or night, 
as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, 
with everything comfortable about him, read- 
ing books, or classing butterflies, or painting 
pictures. If it is any comfort to you to be told 
that the rough work is the more honorable of 
the two, I should be sorry to take that much of 
consolation from you ; and in some sense I need 
not. The rough work is at all events real, 
honest, and, generally, though not always, use- 
ful; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, 
foolish and false as well as fine, and therefore 
dishonorable : but when both kinds are equally 
well and worthily done, the head's is the noble 
work, and the hand's the ignoble; and of all 
hand work whatsoever, necessary for the main- 
tenance of life, those old words, "In the sweat 
of thy face thou shalt eat bread," indicate that 
the inherent nature of it is one of calamity; and 
that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 55 

some shadow of degradation into our contest 
with its thorn and its thistle ; so that all nations 
have held their days honorable, or "holy," and 
constituted them "holy-days," "or holidays," 
by making them days of rest ; and the promise, 
which, among all our distant hopes, seems to 
cast the chief brightness over death, is that 
blessing of the dead who die in the Lord, that 
44 they rest from their labors, and their works 
do follow them. ' ' 

And thus the perpetual question and contest 
must arise, who is to do this rough work? and 
how is the worker of it to be comforted, 
redeemed, and rewarded? and what kind of 
play should he have, and what rest, in this 
world, sometimes, as well as in the next? 
Well, my good working friends, these questions 
will take a little time to answer yet. They 
must be answered: all good men are occupied 
with them, and all honest thinkers. There's 
grand head work doing about them ; but much 
must be discovered, and much attempted in 
vain, before anything decisive can be told you. 
Only note these few particulars, which are 
already sure. 

As to the distribution of the hard work. 
None of us, or very few of us, do either hard 
or soft work because we think we ought; but 



56 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

because we have chanced to fall into the way 
of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody 
does anything well that they cannot help 
doing : work is only done well when it is done 
with a will; and no man has a thoroughly 
sound will unless he knows he is doing what 
he should, and is in his place. And, depend 
upon it, all work must be done at last, not in a 
disorderly, scrambling, doggish way, but in an 
ordered, soldierly, human way — a lawful way. 
Men are enlisted for the labor that kills — the 
labor of war: they are counted, trained, fed, 
dressed, and praised for that. Let them be 
enlisted also for the labor that feeds: let them 
be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for 
that. Teach the plough exercise as carefully 
as you do the sword exercise, and let the 
officers of troops of life be held as much 
gentlemen as the officers of troops of death; 
and all is done : but neither this, nor any other 
right thing, can be accomplished — you can't 
even see your way to it — unless, first of all, 
both servant and master are resolved that, 
come what will of it, they will do each other 
justice. People are perpetually squabbling 
about what will be best to do, or easiest to do, 
or advisablest to do, or profitablest to do; but 
they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask 




; You will come to the little crossing sweeper.'*— Page 59. 

The Crown of Wild Olive. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 57 

what it is just to do. And it is the law of 
heaven that you shall not be able to judge what 
is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to 
judge what is just, and to do it. This is the 
one thing constantly reiterated by our Master 
— the order of all others that is given oftenest 
— "Do justice and judgment/' That's your 
Bible order; that's the "Service of God," not 
praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, 
indeed, to sing psalms when you are merry, 
and to pray when you need anything ; and, by 
the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to 
think that praying and psalm-singing are 
"service." If a child finds itself in want of 
anything, it runs in and asks its father for it — 
does it call that, doing its father a service? If 
it begs for a toy or a piece of cake — does it 
call that, serving its father? That, with God, 
is prayer, and He likes to hear it : He likes you 
to ask Him for cake when you want it; but He 
doesn't call that "serving Him." Begging is 
not serving : God likes mere beggars as little 
as you do — He likes honest servants, not beg- 
gars. So when a child loves its father very 
much, and is very happy, it may sing little 
songs about him; but it doesn't call that serv- 
ing its father; neither is singing songs about 
God, serving God. It is enjoying ourselves, if 



58 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

it's anything; most probably it is nothing; but 
if it's anything, it is serving ourselves, not 
God. And yet we are impudent enough to call 
our beggings and chaun tings " Divine Serv- 
ice:" we say "Divine service will be 'per- 
formed' (that's our word — the form of it gone 
through) "at eleven o'clock." Alas! — unless 
we perform Divine service in every willing act 
of our life, we never perform it at all. The 
one Divine work — the one ordered sacrifice — 
is to do justice: and it is the last we are ever 
inclined to do. Anything rather than that! 
As much charity as you choose, but no justice. 
"Nay," you will say, ''charity is greater than 
justice." Yes, it is greater; it is the summit 
of justice — it is the temple of which justice is 
the foundation. But you can't have the top 
without the bottom; you cannot build upon 
charity. You must build upon justice, for this 
main reason, that you have not, at first, char- 
ity to build with. It is the last reward of good 
work. Do justice to your brother (you can do 
that whether you love him or not), and you 
will come to love him. But do injustice to 
him, because you don't love him; and you will 
come to hate him. It is all very fine to think 
you can build upon charity to begin with ; but 
you will find all you have got to begin with, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 59 

begins at home, and is essentially love of your- 
self. You well-to-do people, for instance, who 
are here to-night, will go to M Divine service" 
next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little 
children will have their tight little Sunday 
boots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in 
their hats; and you'll think, complacently and 
piously, how lovely they look ! So they do : and 
you love them heartily, and you like sticking 
feathers in their hats. That's all right : that is 
charity ; but it is charity beginning at home. 
Then you will come to the poor little crossing 
sweeper, got up also, — it, in its Sunday dress, 
— the dirtiest rags it has, — that it may beg the 
better: we shall give it a penny, and think 
how good we are. That's charity going abroad. 
But what does Justice say, walking and watch- 
ing near us? Christian Justice has been 
strangely mute, and seemingly blind ; and, if 
not blind, decrepit, this many a day: she keeps 
her accounts still, however — quite steadily — 
doing them at nights, carefully, with her band- 
age off, and through acutest spectacles (the 
only modern scientific invention she cares 
about). You must put your ear down ever so 
close to her lips to hear her speak ; and then 
you will start at what she first whispers, for it 
will certainly be, "Why shouldn't that little 



60 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as 
well as your own child?" Then you may ask 
Justice in an amazed manner, "How she can 
possibly be so foolish as to think children could 
sweep crossings with feather on their heads?" 
Then you stoop again, and Justice says — still 
in her dull, stupid way — "Then, why don't 
you, every other Sunday, leave your child to 
sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper 
to church in a hat and feather?" Mercy on us 
(you think), what will she say next? And you 
answer, of course, that "you don't, because 
everybody ought to remain content in the posi- 
tion in which Providence has placed them." 
Ah, my friends, that's the gist of the whole 
question. Did Providence put them in that 
position, or did you? You knock a man into a 
ditch, and then you tell him to remain content 
in the "position in which Providence has 
placed him." That's modern Christianity. 
You say — "We did not knock him into the 
ditch." How do you know what you have 
done, or are doing? That's just what we have 
all got to know, and what we shall never 
know until the question with us every morn- 
ing, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but 
how to do the just thing; nor until we are at 
least so far on the way to being Christian, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 61 

as to have understood that maxim of the poor 
half-way Mahometan, "One hour in the exe- 
cution of justice is worth seventy years of 
prayer. ' ' 

Supposing, then, we have it determined with 
appropriate justice, who is to do the hand 
work, the next questions must be how the 
hand-workers are to be paid, and how they are 
to be refreshed, and what play they are to 
have. Now, the possible quantity of play 
depends on the possible quantity of pay ; and 
the quantity of pay is not a matter for consid- 
eration to hand- workers only, but to all work- 
ers. Generally, good, useful work, whether of 
the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not paid 
at all. I don't say it should be so, but it 
always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for 
being amused or being cheated, not for being 
served. Five thousand a year to your talker, 
and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger and 
thinker, is the rule. None of the best head 
work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid 
for. How much do you think Homer got for 
his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bit- 
ter bread and salt, and going up and down 
other people's stairs. In science, the man who 
discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, 
was paid with a dungeon; the man who 



62 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

invented the microscope, and first saw earth, 
died of starvation, driven from his home; it is 
indeed very clear that God means all thor- 
oughly good work and talk to be done for 
nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did not get a 
penny a line for writing Jeremiah's second roll 
for him, I fancy; and Joseph did not get bish- 
op's pay for that long sermon of his to the 
Pharisees; nothing but stones. For indeed 
that is the world-father's proper payment. 
So surely as any of the world's children work 
for the world's good, honestly, with head and 
heart; and come to it, saying, "Give us a little 
bread, just to keep the life n us," the world- 
father answers them, lt No, my children, not 
bread; a stone, if you like, or as many as you 
need, to keep you quiet. " But the hand- work- 
ers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The 
worst that can happen to you is to break stones ; 
not be broken by them. And for you there 
will come a time for better payment ; some day, 
assuredly, more pence will be paid to Peter 
the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope ; 
we shall pay people not quite so much for talk- 
ing in Parliament and doing nothing, as for 
holding their tongues out of it and doing 
something ; we shall pay our ploughman a little 
more and our lawyer a little less, and so on: 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 63 

but, at least, we may even now take care that 
whatever work is done shall be fully paid for; 
and the man who does it paid for it, not some- 
body else ; and that it shall be done in an order- 
ly, soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under 
good captains and lieutenants of labor; and 
that it shall have its appointed times of rest, 
and enough of them; and that in those times 
the play shall be wholesome play, not in the- 
atrical gardens, with tin flowers and gas sun- 
shine, and girls dancing because of their mis- 
ery ; but in true gardens, with real flowers, and 
real sunshine, and children dancing because of 
their gladness ; so that truly the streets shall 
be full (the "streets, " mind you, not the gut- 
ters) of children, playing in the midst thereof. 
We may take care that workingmen shall have 
at least as good books to read as anybody else, 
when they've time to read them ; and as com- 
fortable firesides to sit at as anybody else when 
they've time to sit at them. This, I think, can 
be managed for you, my working friends, in 
the good time. 

IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, 
concerning ourselves all, as workers. What 
is wise work, and what is foolish work? What 
the difference between sense and nonsense, 
in daily occupation? 



64 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Well, wise work is, briefly, work with God. 
Foolish work is work against God. And work 
done with God, which He will help, may be 
briefly described as " Putting in Order" — that 
is, enforcing God's law of order, spiritual and 
material, over men and things. The first 
thing you have to do, essentially; the real 
"good work" is, with respect to men, to en- 
force justice, and with respect to things, to 
enforce tidiness, and fruitfulness. And against 
these two great human deeds, justice and 
order, there are perpetually two great demons 
contending, — the devil of iniquity, or inequity, 
and the devil of disorder, or of death; for 
death is only consummation of disorder. You 
have to fight these two fiends daily. So far as 
you don't fight against the fiend of iniquity, 
you work for him. You "work iniquity," and 
the judgment upon you, for all your "Lord, 
Lord's," will be "Depart from me, ye that 
work iniquity. ' ' And so far as you do not 
resist the fiend of disorder, you work disorder, 
and you yourself do the work of Death, which 
is sin, and has for its wages, Death himself. 

Observe then, all wise work is mainly three- 
fold in character. It is honest, useful, and 
cheerful. 

I. It is honest. I hardly know anything 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 65 

more strange than that you recognize honesty 
in play, and you do not in work. In your 
lightest games, you have always some one to 
see what you call "fair-play." In boxing, 
you must hit fair ; in racing, start fair. Your 
English watchword is fair-play, your English 
hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you that 
you wanted another watchword also, fair- work, 
and another hatred also, foul- work? Your 
prize-fighter has some honor in him yet; and 
so have the men in the ring round him : they 
will judge him to lose the match, by foul hit- 
ting. But your prize-merchant gains his match 
by foul selling, and no one cries out against 
that. You drive a gambler out of the gambling- 
room who loads dice, but you leave a trades- 
man in flourishing business who loads scales! 
For observe, all dishonest dealing is loading 
scales. What does it matter whether I get 
short weight, adulterate substance, or dis- 
honest fabric? The fault in the fabric is incom- 
parably the worst of the two. Give me short 
measure of food, and I only lose by you ; but 
give me adulterate food, and I die by you. 
Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen 
and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, and 
to us who would help you. We can do nothing 
for you, nor you for yourselves, without hon- 

5 Crown 



66 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

esty. Get that, you get all ; without that, your 
suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade meas- 
ures, your institutions of science, are all in 
vain. It is useless to put your heads together, 
if you can't put your hearts together. Shoul- 
der to shoulder, right hand to right hand, 
among yourselves, and no wrong hand to any- 
body else, and you'll win the world yet. 

II. Then, secondly, wise work is useful. No 
man minds, or ought to mind, its being hard, 
if only it comes to something : but when it is 
hard, and comes to nothing; when all our bees' 
business turns to spiders'; and for honey- 
comb we have only resultant cobweb, blown 
away by the next breeze — that is the cruel 
thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask 
ourselves, personally, or even nationally, 
whether our work is coming to anything or 
not? We don't care to keep what has been 
nobly done ; still less do we care to do nobly 
what others would keep ; and, least of all, to 
make the work itself useful instead of deadly 
to the doer, so as to use his life indeed, but 
not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest' 
waste that you can commit is the waste of 
labor. If you went down in the morning into 
your dairy, and you found that your youngest 
child had got down before you ; and that he 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 67 

and the cat were at play together, and that he 
had poured out all the cream on the floor for 
the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, 
and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if, 
instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, 
there are golden bowls with human life in 
them, and instead of the cat to play with — the 
devil to play with; and you yourself the 
player; and instead of leaving that golden 
bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, 
you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the 
human blood out on the ground for the fiend 
to lick up — that is no waste! What! you 
perhaps think, " to waste the labor of men is 
not to kill them." Is it not? I should like to 
know how you could kill them more utterly — 
kill them with second deaths? It is the 
slightest way of killing to stop a man's breath. 
Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little 
whistling bullets — our love-messengers be- 
tween nation and nation — have brought pleas- 
ant messages from us to many a man before 
now ; orders of sweet release, and leave at last 
to go where he will be most welcome and most 
happy. At the worst you do but shorten his 
life, you do not corrupt his life. But if you 
put him to base labor, if you bind his thoughts, 
if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, 



68 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body, 
and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so 
much as to reap the poor fruit of his degrada- 
tion, but gather that for yourself, and dismiss 
him to the grave, when you have done with 
him, having, so far as in you lay, made the 
walls of that grave everlasting (though, in- 
deed, I fancy the goodly bricks of some of 
our family vaults will hold closer in the resur- 
rection day than the sod over the laborer's 
head), this you think is no waste, and no sin! 

III. Then, lastly, wise work is cheerful, as 
a child's work is. And now I want you to 
take one thought home with you, and let it 
stay with you. 

Everybody in this room has been taught 
to pray daily, "Thy kingdom come." Now, 
if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think 
it very wrong, and say he "takes God's name 
in vain. " But there's a twenty times worse 
way of taking His name in vain than that. It 
is to ask God for what we don't want. He 
doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't 
want a thing, don't ask for it: such asking is 
the worst mockery of your King you can mock 
Him with; the soldiers striking Him on the 
head with the reed was nothing to that. If 
you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 69 

for it. But if you do, you must do more than 
pray for it; you must work for it. And, to 
work for it, you must know what it is : we have 
all prayed for it many a day without thinking. 
Observe, it is a kingdom that is to come to us ; 
we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a 
kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, 
it is not to come all at once, but quietly; 
nobody knows how; "The kingdom of God 
cometh not with observation." Also, it is not 
to come outside of us, but in the hearts of us: 
"the kingdom of God is within you.'V And 
being within us, it is not a thing to be seen, 
but to be felt ; and though it brings all sub- 
stance of good with it, it does not consist in 
that: "the kingdom of God is not meat and 
drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the 
Holy Ghost:" joy, that is to say, in the holy, 
healthful, and helpful Spirit. Now, if we want 
to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and 
enter into it, there's just one condition to be 
first accepted. You must enter it as children, 
or not at all; "Whosoever will not receive it 
as a little child shall not enter therein." And 
again, "Suffer little children to come unto me, 
and forbid them not, for of such is the king- 
dom of heaven." 

Of such, observe. Not of children them- 



70 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

selves, but of such as children. I believe most 
mothers who read that text think that all 
heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not 
so. There will be children there, but the hoary 
head is the crown. " Length of days, and long 
life and peace, ' * that is the blessing, not to die 
in babyhood. Children die but for their 
parent's sins; God means them to live, but He 
can't let them always; then they have their 
earlier place in heaven : and the little child of 
David, vainly prayed for; — the little child of 
Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its 
own threshold, — they will be there. But weary 
old David, and weary old Barzillai, having 
learned children's lessons at last, will be there, 
too : and the one question for us all, young or 
old, is, have we learned our child's lesson? it 
is the character of children we want, and 
must gain at our peril ; let us see, briefly, in 
what it consists. 

The first character of right childhood is that 
it is Modest. A well-bred child does not think 
it can teach its parents, or that it knows every- 
thing. It may think its father and mother 
know everything, — perhaps that all grown-up 
people know everything; very certainly it is 
sure that it does not. And it is always asking 
questions, and wanting to know more. Well, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 71 

that is the first character of a good and wise 
man at his work. To know that he knows very- 
little ; — to perceive that there are many above 
him wiser than he ; and to be always asking 
questions, wanting to learn, not to teach. No 
one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or 
governs well who wants to govern ; it is an old 
saying (Plato's, but I know not if his, first), 
and as wise as old. 

Then, the second character of right child- 
hood is to be Faithful. Perceiving that its 
father knows best what is good for it, and hav- 
ing found always, when it has tried its own 
way against his, that he was right and it was 
wrong, a noble child trusts him at last wholly, 
gives him its hand, and will walk blindfold 
with him, if he bids it. And that is the true 
character of all good men also, as obedient 
workers, or soldiers under captains. They 
must trust their captains ; — they are bound for 
their lives to choose none but those whom they 
can trust. Then, they are not always to be 
thinking that what seems strange to them, or 
wrong in what they are desired to do, is 
strange or wrong. They know their captain : 
where he leads they must follow, what he bids, 
they must do ; and without this trust and faith, 
without this captainship and soldiership, no 



72 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

great deed, no great salvation, is possible to 
man. Among all the nations it is only when 
this faith is attained by them that they become 
great: the Jew, the Greek, and the Mahom- 
etan, agree at least in testifying to this. It 
was a deed of this absolute trust which made 
Abraham the father of the faithful ; it was the 
declaration of the power of God as captain 
over all men, and the acceptance of a leader 
appointed by Him as commander of the faith- 
ful, which laid the foundation of whatever 
national power yet exists in the East ; and the 
deed of the Greeks, which has become the 
type of unselfish and noble soldiership to all 
lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on 
the tomb of those who gave their lives to do 
it, in the most pathetic, so far as I know, or 
can feel, of all human utterances: "Oh, 
stranger, go and tell our people that we are 
lying here, having obeyed their words." 

Then the third character of right childhood 
is to be Loving and Generous. Give a little 
love to a child, and you get a great deal back. 
It loves everything near it, when it is a right 
kind of child — would hurt nothing, would give 
the best it has away, always, if you need it — 
does not lay plans for getting everything in the 
house for itself, and delights in helping peo- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 73 

pie ; you cannot please it so much as by giving 
it a chance of being useful, in ever so little 
a way. 

And because of all these characters, lastly, 
it is Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, 
it is careful for nothing — being full of love to 
every creature, it is happy always, whether in 
its play or in its duty. Well, that's the great 
worker's character also. Taking no thought 
for the morrow ; taking thought only for the 
duty of the day; trusting somebody else to 
take care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed what 
labor is, but not what sorrow is ; and always 
ready for play, — beautiful play, — for lovely 
human play is like the play of the Sun. 
There's a worker for you. He, steady to his 
time, is set as a strong man to run his course, 
but also, he rejoiceth as a strong man to run 
his course. See how he plays in the morning, 
with the mists below, and the clouds above, 
with a ray here and a flash there, and a shower 
of jewels everywhere; — that's the Sun's play; 
and great human play is like his — all various 
— all full of light and life, and tender, as the 
dew of the morning. 

So then, you have the child's character in 
these four things — Humility, Faith, Charity, 
and Cheerfulness. That's what you have got 

6 Crown 



74 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE 

to be converted to. " Except ye be converted 

and become as little children" — You hear 
much of conversion nowadays; but people 
always seem to think you have got to be made 
wretched by conversion, — to be converted to 
long faces. No, friends, you have got to be 
converted to short ones; you have to repent 
into childhood, to repent into delight, and de- 
lightsomeness. You can't go into a conven- 
ticle but you'll hear plenty of talk of backslid- 
ing. Backsliding, indeed! I can tell you, 
on the ways most of us go, the faster we slide 
back the better. Slide back into the cradle, 
if going on is into the grave — back, I tell you; 
back — out of your long faces, and into your 
long clothes. It is among children only, and 
as children only, that you will find medicine 
for your healing and true wisdom for your 
teaching. There is poison in the counsels of 
the man of this w r orld ; the words they speak 
are all bitterness, "the poison of asps is under 
their lips/' but "the suckling child shall play 
by the hole of the asp. M There is death in 
the looks of men. "Their eyes are privily set 
against the poor;" they are as the uncharm- 
able serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by 
seeing. But "the weaned child shall lay his 
hand on the cockatrice den." There is death 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 75 

in the steps of men: " their feet are swift to 
shed blood; they have compassed us in our 
steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, 
and the young lion lurking in secret places, ' ' 
but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall lie down 
with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion, 
and "a little child shall lead them." There is 
death in the thoughts of men ; the world is one 
wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it 
draws to a close ; but the secret of it is known 
to the child, and the Lord of heaven and 
earth is most to be thanked in that "He has 
hidden these things from the wise and pru- 
dent, and has revealed them unto babes." 
Yes, and there is death — infinitude of death in 
the principalities and powers of men. As far 
as the east is from the west, so far our sins 
are — not set from us, but multiplied around us : 
the Sun himself, think you he now "rejoices" 
to run his course, when he plunges westward 
to the horizon, so widely red, not with 
clouds, but blood? And it will be red more 
widely yet. Whatever drought of the early 
and latter rain may be, there will be none of 
that red rain. You fortify yourselves against 
it in vain; the enemy and avenger will be 
upon you also, unless you learn that it is not 
out of the mouths of the knitted gun, or the. 



76 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

smoothed rifle, but "out of the mouths of 
babes and sucklings" that the strength is 
ordained, which shall "still the enemy and 
avenger. ' ' 



LECTURE II. 
TRAFFIC. 



77 



LECTURE II. 

TRAFFIC. 

(Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford.) 

My good Yorkshire friends, you have asked 
me down here among your hills that I might 
talk to you about this Exchange you are going 
to build; but earnestly and seriously asking 
you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing 
of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say 
very little, about this same Exchange. I must 
talk of quite other things, though not unwill- 
ingly; — I could not deserve your pardon, if 
when you invited me to speak on one subject, 
I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot 
speak, to purpose, of anything about which I 
do not care ; and most simply and sorrowfully 
I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do not 
care about this Exchange of yours. 

If, however, when you sent me your invita- 
tion, I had answered, "I won't come. I don't 
care about the Exchange of Bradford, M you 
would have been justly offended with me, not 
knowing the reason of so blunt a carelessness. 
So I have come down, hoping that you will 

79 



80 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

patiently let me tell you why, on this, and 
many other such occasions, I now remain sil- 
ent, when formerly I should have caught at 
the opportunity of speaking to a gracious audi- 
ence. 

In a word, then, I do not care about this 
Exchange, — because you don't; and because 
you know perfectly well I cannot make you. 
Look at the essential circumstances of the 
case, which you, as business men, know per- 
fectly well, though perhaps you think I forget 
them. You are going to spend 30,000/., which 
to you, collectively, is nothing ; the buying a 
new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more 
important matter of consideration to me than 
building a new Exchange is to you. But you 
think you may as well have the right thing for 
your money. You know there are a great 
many odd styles of architecture about ; you 
don't want to do anything ridiculous; you hear 
of me, among others, as a respectable archi- 
tectural man-milliner; and you send for me, 
that I may tell you the leading fashion ; and 
what is, in our shops, for the moment, the 
newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. 

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you 
cannot have good architecture merely by ask- 
ing people's advice on occasion. All good 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 81 

architecture is the expression of national life 
and character, and it is produced by a prevalent 
and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. 
And I want you to think a little of the deep 
significance of this word " taste;" for no state- 
ment of mine has been more earnestly or 
oftener controverted than that good taste is 
essentially a moral quality. "No," say many 
of my antagonists, "taste is one thing, moral- 
ity is another. Tell us what is pretty ; we 
shall be glad to know that ; but preach no ser- 
mons to us." 

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old 
dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only 
a part and an index of morality — it is the only 
morality. The first, and last, and closest trial 
question to any living creature is, "What do 
you like?" Tell me what you like, and I'll 
tell you what you are. Go out into the street, 
and ask the first man or woman you meet, 
what their "taste" is, and if they answer can- 
didly, you know them, body and soul. "You, 
my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, 
what do you like?" "A pipe and a quartern 
of gin." I know you. "You, my good 
woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, 
what do you like?" "A swept hearth and a 
clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, 



82 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

and a baby at my breast. " Good, I know you 
also. "You, little girl with the golden hair 
and soft eyes, what do you like?" "My 
canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths. " 
"You, little boy with the dirty hands and the 
low forehead, what do you like?" "A shy at 
the sparrows, and a game of pitch-farthing." 
Good; we know them all now. What more 
need we ask? 

"Nay, " perhaps you answer: "we need 
rather to ask what these people and children 
do, than what they like. If they do right, it is 
no matter that they like what is wrong ; and if 
they do wrong, it is no matter that they like 
what is right. Doing is the great thing; and 
it does not matter that the man likes drink- 
ing, so that he does not drink; nor that 
the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if 
she will not learn her lessons; nor that the lit- 
tle boy likes throwing stones at the sparrows, 
if he goes to the Sunday school." Indeed, 
for a short time, and in a provisional sense, 
this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what 
is right, in time they come to like doing it. 
But they only are in a right moral stage when 
they have come to like doing it ; and as long 
as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious 
state. The man is not in health of body who 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 83 

is always thirsting for the bottle in the cup- 
board, though he bravely bears his thirst ; but 
the man who heartily enjoys water in the 
morning and wine in the evening, each in its 
proper quantity and time. And the entire ob- 
ject of true education is to make people not 
merely do the right things, but enjoy the right 
things — not merely industrious, but to love in- 
dustry — not merely learned, but to love knowl- 
edge — not merely pure, but to loyg purity — 
not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after 
justice. 

But you may answer or think, c 'Is the liking 
for outside ornaments, — for pictures, for sta- 
tues, or furniture, or architecture,— a moral 
quality?" Yes, most surely, if a rightly set 
liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not 
a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. 
Only here again we have to define the word 
"good. " I don't mean by ' 'good, " clever — or 
learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a pic- 
ture by Teniers, of sots quarreling over their 
dice : it is an entirely clever picture ; so clever 
that nothing in its kind has ever been done 
equal to it ; but it is also an entirely base and 
evil picture. It is an expression of delight in 
the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, 
and delight in that is an "unmannered," or 



84 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

44 immoral' * quality. It is 44 bad taste" in the 
profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. 
On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a 
Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner 
landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual 
contemplation of a good and perfect thing. 
That is an entirely moral quality — it is the 
taste of the angels. And all delight in art, 
and all love of it, resolve themselves into sim- 
ple love of that which deserves love. That 
deserving is the quality which we call 4 "loveli- 
ness" — (we ought to have an opposite word, 
hateliness, to be said of the things which 
deserve to be hated) ; and it is not an indiffer- 
ent nor optional thing whether we love this or 
that; but it is just the vital function of all our 
being. What we like determines what we 
are, and is the sign of what we are ; and to 
teach taste is inevitably to form character. 
As I was thinking ovef this, in walking up 
Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the 
title of a book standing open in a bookseller's 
window. It was — "On the necessity of the 
diffusion of taste among all classes." "Ah," 
I thought to myself, "my classifying friend, 
when you have diffused your taste, where will 
your classes be? The man who likes what you 
like, belongs to the same class with you, I 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 85 

think. Inevitably so. You may put him to 
other work if you choose; but, by the condi- 
tion you have brought him into, he will dislike 
the other work as much as you would your- 
self. You get hold of a scavenger, or a coster- 
monger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calender 
for literature, and 'Pop goes the Weasel!* for 
music. You think you can make him like 
Dante or Beethoven? I wish you joy of your 
lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentle- 
man of him: — he won't like to go back to his 
costermongering. ' ' 

And as completely and unexceptionally is 
this so, that if I had time to-night, I could 
show you that a nation cannot be affected by 
any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, 
legibly, and forever, either in bad art, or by 
want of art ; and that there is no national vir- 
tue, small or great, which is not manifestly ex- 
pressed in all the art which circumstances en- 
able the people possessing that virtue to pro- 
duce. Take, for instance, your great English 
virtue of enduring and patient courage. You 
have at present in England only one art of any 
consequence — that is, iron-working. You 
know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer 
iron. Now, do you think in those masses of 
lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, 



86 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

and which you forge at the mouths of the In- 
fernos you have created; do you think, on 
those iron plates, your courage and endurance 
are not written forever — not merely with an 
iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take 
also your great English vice — European vice — 
vice of all the world — vice of all other worlds 
that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them 
yet the atmosphere of hell — the vice of jeal- 
ousy, which brings competition into commerce, 
treachery into your councils, and dishonor into 
your wars — that vice which has rendered for 
you, and for your next neighboring nation, the 
daily occupations of existence no longer possi- 
ble, but with the mail upon your breasts and 
the sword loose in its sheath; so that, at last, 
you have realized for all the multitudes of the 
two great peoples who lead the so-called civil- 
ization of the earth — you have realized for 
them all, I say, in person and in policy, what 
was once true only of the rough Border riders 
of your Cheviot hills — 

They carved at the meal 
With gloves of steel, 
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd ; 

do you think that this national shame and das- 
tardliness of heart are not written as legibly 
on every rivet of your iron armor as the 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 87 

strength of the right hands that forged it? 
Friends, I know not whether this thing be the 
more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is 
quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of 
being now sent for by you, I had been sent fo. 
by some private gentleman, living in a subur- 
ban house, with his garden separated only by 
a fruit-wall from his next-door neighbor's; 
and he had called me to consult with him on 
the furnishing of his drawing-room. I begin 
looking about me, and find the walls rather 
bare ; I think such and such a paper might be 
desirable — perhaps a little fresco here and 
there on the ceiling — a damask curtain or so at 
the windows. 4< Ah," says my employer, 
44 damask curtains, indeed! That's all very 
fine, but you know I can't afford that kind of 
thing just now!" "Yet the world credits you 
with a splendid income!" "Ah, yes," said 
my friend, "but do you know, at present, I am 
obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?" 
44 Steel- traps! for whom?" "Why, for that fel- 
low on the other side the wall, you know; 
we're very good friends, capital friends; but 
we are obliged to keep our traps set on both 
sides of the wall; we could not possibly keep 
on friendly terms without them, and our 
spring-guns. The worst of it is, we are both 



88 THE CROWiNT OF WILD OLIVE. 

clever fellows enough; and there's never a 
day passes that we don't find out a new trap, 
or a new gun-barrel, or something ; we spend 
about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, 
take it all together; and I don't see how we're 
to do with less. ' ' A highly comic state of life 
for two private gentlemen ! but for two nations, 
it seems to me, not wholly comic! Bedlam 
would be comic, perhaps, if there were only 
one madman in it ; and your Christmas panto- 
mime is comic, when there is only one clown 
in it ; but when the whole world turns clown, 
and paints itself red with its own heart's blood 
instead of vermilion, it is something else than 
comic, I think. 

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, 
and willingly allow for that. You don't know 
what to do with yourselves for a sensation: 
fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you 
through the whole of this unendurably long 
mortal life ; you liked pop-guns when you were 
schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only 
the same things better made; but then the 
worst of it is, that what was play to you when 
boys, was not play to the sparrows ; and what 
is play to you now, is not play to the small 
birds of State neither; and for the black 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 89 

eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots 
at them, if I mistake not. 

I must get back to the matter in hand, how- 
ever. Believe me, without farther instance, I 
could show you, in all time, that every nation's 
vice, or virtue, was written in its art ; the sol- 
diership of early Greece; the sensuality of late 
Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the 
splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. 
I have no time to do this to-night (I have done 
it elsewhere before now) ; but I proceed to 
apply the principle to ourselves in a more 
searching manner. 

I notice that among all the new buildings 
that cover your once wild hills, churches and 
schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in 
large proportion, with your mills and man- 
sions; and I notice also that the churches and 
schools are almost always Gothic, and the 
mansions and mills are never Gothic. Will 
you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of 
this? For remember, it is peculiarly a modern 
phenomenon. When Gothic was invented, 
houses were Gothic as well as churches ; and 
when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, 
churches were Italian as well as houses. If 
there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Ant- 
werp, if there is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel 



90 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones builds an 
Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds 
an Italian St. Paul's. But now you live under 
one school of architecture, and worship under 
another. What do you mean by doing this? 
Am I to understand that you are thinking of 
changing your architecture back to Gothic; 
and that you treat your churches experimen- 
tally, because it does not matter what mistakes 
you make in a church? Or am I to understand 
that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently 
sacred and beautiful mode of building, which 
you think, like the fine frankincense, should 
be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved 
for your religious services? For if this be the 
feeling, though it may seem at first as if it 
were graceful and reverent, you will find that, 
at the root of the matter, it signifies neither 
more nor less than that you have separated 
your religion from your life. 

For consider what a wide significance this 
fact has ; and remember that it is not you only, 
but all the people of England, who are behav- 
ing thus just now. 

You have all got into the habit of calling the 
church "the house of God. " I have seen, over 
the doors of many churches, the legend 
actually carved, "This is the house of God, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 91 

and this is the gate of heaven." Now, note 
where that legend comes from, and of what 
place it was first spoken. A boy leaves his 
father's house to go on a long journey on foot, 
to visit his uncle ; he has to cross a wild hill- 
desert ; just as if one of your own boys had to 
cross the wolds of Westmoreland, to visit an 
uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day 
your boy finds himself somewhere between 
Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, 
at sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy ; he 
cannot go one foot farther that night. Down 
he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he 
may, gathering a few of the stones together to 
put under his head ; — so wild the place is, he 
cannot get anything but stones. And there, 
lying under the broad night, he has a dream ; 
and he sees a ladder set up on the earth, and 
the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels 
of God are ascending and descending upon it. 
And when he wakes out of his sleep, he says, 
44 How dreadful is this place; surely, this is 
none other than the house of God, and this is 
the gate of heaven." This place, observe; 
not this church; not this city; not this stone, 
even, which he puts up for a memorial — the 
piece of flint on which his head has lain. But 
this place ; this windy slope of Wharnside ; this 



92 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

moorland hollow, torrent-bitten, snow-blight- 
ed; this any place where God lets down the 
ladder. And how are you to know where that 
will be? or how are you to determine where it 
may be, but by being ready for it always? Do 
you know where the lightning is to fall next? 
You do know that, partly ; you can guide the 
lightning; but you cannot guide the going 
forth of the Spirit, which is that lightning 
when it shines from the east to the west. 

But the perpetual and insolent warping of 
that strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiasti- 
cal purpose, is only one of the thousand in- 
stances in which we sink back into gross Juda- 
ism. We call our churches * 'temples. ' ' Now, 
you know, or ought to know, they are not tem- 
ples. They have never had, never can have, 
anything whatever to do with temples. They 
are " synagogues' ' — "gathering places" — 
where you gather yourselves together as an 
assembly; and by not calling them so, you 
again miss the force of another mighty text 
-^-"Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as 
the hypocrites are ; for they love to pray stand- 
ing in the churches" (we should translate it), 
4 'that they may be seen of men. But thou, 
when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and 
when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 93 

Father, " — which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, 
but "in secret." 

Now, you feel, as I say this to you — I know 
you feel — as if I were trying to take away the 
honor of your churches. Not so ; I am trying 
to prove to you the honor of your houses and 
your hills ; I am trying to show you — not that 
the Church is not sacred — but that the whole 
Earth is. I would have you feel, what care- 
less, what constant, what infectious sin there' 
is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling 
your churches only "holy, " you call your 
hearths and homes profane; and have sepa- 
rated yourselves from the heathen by casting 
all your household gods to the ground, instead 
of recognizing, in the place of their many and 
feeble Lares, the presence of your One and 
Mighty Lord and Lar. 

"But what has all this to do with our Ex- 
change?'' you ask me, impatiently. My dear 
friends, it has just everything to do with it; 
on these inner and great questions depend all 
the outer and little ones; and if you have 
asked me down here to speak to you because 
you had before been interested in anything I 
have written, you must know that all I have 
yet said about architecture was to show this. 
The book I called "The Seven Lamps" was to 



94 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

show that certain right states of temper and 
I moral feeling were the magic powers by which 
I all good architecture, without exception, had 
ibeen produced. "The Stones of Venice" 
jhad, from beginning to end, no other aim than 
to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice 
had arisen out of, and indicated in all its feat- 
ures, a state of pure national faith, and of 
domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance 
architecture had arisen out of, and in all its 
features indicated, a state of concealed 
national infidelity, and of domestic corruption. 
And now, you ask me what style is best to 
build in; and how can I answer, knowing the 
meaning of the two styles, but by another 
question — do you mean to build as Christians 
or as Infidels? And still more — do you mean 
to build as honest Christians or as honest Infi- 
dels? as thoroughly and confessedly either one 
or the other? You don't like to be asked such 
rude questions. I cannot help it ; they are of 
much more importance than this Exchange 
business ; and if they can be at once answered, 
the Exchange business settles itself in a mo- 
ment. But, before I press them further, I 
must ask leave to explain one point clearly. 
In all my past work, my endeavor has been to 
show that good architecture is essentially 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 95 

religious — the production of a faithful and vir- 
tuous, not of an infidel and corrupted people. 
But in the course of doing this, I have had also 
to show that good architecture is not ecclesias- 
tical. People are so apt to look upon religion 
as the business of the clergy, not their own, 
that the moment they hear of anything depend- 
ing on " religion/ ' they think it must also 
have depended on the priesthood; and I have 
had to take what place was to be occupied be- 
tween these two errors, and fight both, often 
with seeming contradiction. Good architecture 
is the work of good and believing men ; there- 
fore, you say, at least some people say, "Good 
architecture must essentially have been the 
work of the clergy, not of the laity. ' ' No — a 
thousand times no; good architecture has 
always been the work of the commonalty, not 
of the clergy. What, you say, those glorious 
cathedrals — the pride of Europe — did their 
builders not form Gothic architecture? No; 
they corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic 
was formed in the baron's castle, and the 
burgher's street. It was formed by the 
thoughts, and hands, and powers of free citi- 
zens and soldier kings. By the monk it was 
used as an instrument for the aid of his super- 
stition; when that superstition became a 



96 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Eur- 
ope vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, 
and vainly raged and perished in the crusade 
— through that fury of perverted faith and 
wasted war, the Gothic rose also to its loveli- 
est, most fantastic, and, finally most foolish 
dreams ; and, in those dreams, was lost. 

I hope, now, that there is no risk of your 
misunderstanding me when I come to the gist 
of what I want to say to-night — when I re- 
peat, that every great national architecture 
has been the result and exponent of a great 
national religion. You can't have bits of it 
here, bits there — you must have it every- 
where, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of 
a clerical company it is not the exponent of a 
theological dogma — it is not the hieroglyphic 
writing of an initiated priesthood ; it is the 
manly language of a people inspired by reso- 
lute and common purpose, and rendering reso- 
lute and common fidelity to the legible laws of 
an undoubted God. 

Now, there have as yet been three distinct 
schools of European architecture. I say, Eu- 
ropean, because Asiatic and African architec- 
ture belong so entirely to other races and cli- 
mates, that there is no question of them here; 
only, in passing, I will simply assure you that 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 97 

whatever is good or great in, Egypt, and Syria, 
and India, is just good or great for the same 
reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bos- 
phorus. We Europeans, then, have had three 
great religions; the Greek, which was the 
worship of the God of Wisdom and Power ; the 
Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God 
of Judgment and Consolation; the Renais- 
sance, which was the worship of the God of 
Pride and Beauty; these three we have had — 
they are past, — and now, at last, we English 
have got a fourth religion, and a God of our 
own, about which I want to ask you. But I 
must explain these three old ones first. 

I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially wor- 
shipped the God of Wisdom ; so that whatever 
contended against their religion, — to the Jews 
a stumbling-block, — was, to the Greeks — 
Foolishness. 

The first Greek idea of Deity was that ex- 
pressed in the word, of which we keep the 
remnant in our words, "Di-urnar' and 4< Di- 
vine* ' — the god of Day, Jupiter the revealer. 
Athena is his daughter, but especially daughter 
of the Intellect, springing armed from the 
head. We are only with the help of recent in- 
vestigation beginning to penetrate the depth 
of meaning couched under the Athenaic sym- 

7 Crown 



98 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

bols; but I may note rapidly, that her aegis the 
mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she 
often, in the best statues, is represented as fold- 
ing up her left hand for better guard, and the 
gorgon on her shield, are both representative 
mainly of the chilling horror and sadness 
(turning men to stone, as it were), of the out- 
most and superficial spheres of knowledge — 
that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, 
hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full- 
grown man from the heart of the child. For 
out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dis- 
sension, danger, and disdain; but from perfect 
knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, 
strength and peace, in sign of which she is 
crowned with the olive spray, and bears the 
resistless spear. 

This, then, was the Greek conception of 
purest Deity, and every habit of life, and every 
form of his art developed themselves from the 
seeking this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; 
and setting himself, as a man, to do things 
evermore rightly and strongly ;* not with any 

*It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or 
seeking, was chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of 
Rightness and Strength founded on Forethought; the 
principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but de- 
sign; and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Vir- 
gin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine 
Wisdom and Purity. Next to these great deities rank, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 99 

ardent affection or ultimate hope ; but with a 
resolute and contingent energy of will, as 
knowing that for failure there was no consola- 
tion, and for sin there was no remission. And 
the Greek architecture rose unerring, bright, 
clearly defined, and self-contained. 

Next followed in Europe the great Christian 
faith, which was essentially the religion of 
Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission 
of sins ; for which cause it happens, too often, 
in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and 
sickness themselves are partly glorified, as if, 
the more you have to be healed of, the more 
divine was the healing. The practical result 
of this doctrine, in art, is a continual contem- 
plation of sin and disease, and of imaginary 
states of purification from them ; thus we have 
an architecture conceived in a mingled senti- 
ment of melancholy and aspiration, partly 
severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend it- 
self to every one of our needs, and every one 
of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, 
as we are strong or weak ourselves. It is, of 
all architecture, the basest, when base people 

in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres, 
the givers of human strength and life; then, for heroic 
example, Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among 
the Greeks in the great times ; and the Muses are essen- 
tially teachers of Truth, and of its harmonies. 



arc 



100 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

build it — of all, the noblest, when built by the 
noble. 

And now note that both these religions — 
Greek and Mediaeval — perished by falsehood 
in their own main purpose. The Greek reli- 
gion of Wisdom perished in a false philosophy 
— "Oppositions of science, falsely so called." 
The Mediaeval religion of Consolation perished 
in false comfort ; in remission of sins given 
lyingly. It was the selling of absolution that 
ended the Mediaeval faith; and I can tell you 
more, it is the selling of absolution which, to 
the end of time, will mark false Christianity. 
Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins 
only by ending them; but false Christianity 
gets her remission of sins by compounding for 
them. And there are many ways of com- 
pounding for them. We English have beauti- 
ful little quiet ways of buying absolution, 
whether in low Church or high, far more cun- 
ning than any of Tetzel's trading. 

Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of 
Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to 
luxury, ending in death. First, bals masques 
in every saloon, and then guillotines in every 
square. And all these three worships issue 
in vast temple building. Your Greek wor- 
shipped Wisdom, and built you the Parthenon 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 101 

. — the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval wor- 
shipped Consolation, and built you Virgin tem- 
ples also — but to our Lady of Salvation. Then 
the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, 
and built you Versailles, and the Vatican. 
Now, lastly, will you tell me what we worship, 
and what we build? 

You know we are speaking always of the 
real, active, continual, national worship; that 
by which men act while they live ; not that 
which they talk of when they die. Now, we 
have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we 
pay tithes of property and sevenths of time : 
but we have also a practical and earnest relig- 
ion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our 
property and six-sevenths of our time. And 
we dispute a great deal about the nominal 
religion ; but we are all unanimous about this 
practical one, of which I think you will admit j 
that the ruling goddess may be best generally 
described as the t4 Goddess of Getting-on," or ' 
44 Britannia of the Market." The Athenians 
had an "Athena Agoraia. " or Minerva of the 
Market; but she was a subordinate type of 
their goddess, while our Britannia Agoraia is 
the principal type of ours. And all your great 
architectural works, are, of course, built to 
her. It is long since you built a great cathe- 



102 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

dral ; and how you would laugh at me, if I pro- 
posed building a cathedral on the top of one of 
these hills of yours, taking it for an Acropo- 
lis! But your railroad mounds, prolonged 
masses of Acropolis; your railroad stations, 
vaster than the Parthenon, and innumerable; 
your chimneys, how much more mighty and 
costly than cathedral spires! your harbor- 
piers; your warehouses; your exchanges! — all 
these are built to your great Goddess of 
"Getting-on;" and she has formed, and will 
continue to form, your architecture, as long as 
you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask 
me to tell you how to build to her; you know 
far better than I. 

There might indeed, on some theories, be a 
conceivably good architecture for Exchanges — 
that is to say if there were any heroism in the 
fact or deed of exchange, which might be typi- 
cally carved on the outside of your building. 
For, you know, all beautiful architecture must 
be adorned with sculpture or painting; and for 
sculpture or painting, you must have a sub- 
ject. And hitherto it has been a received 
opinion among the nations of the world that 
the only right subjects for either, were hero- 
isms of some sort. Even on his pots and his 
flagons, the Greek put a Hercules slaying 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 103 

lions, or an Apollo slaying serpents, or Bac- 
chus slaying melancholy giants, and earth- 
borne despondencies. On his temples, the 
Greek put contests of great warriors in found- 
ing states, or of gods with evil spirits. On 
his houses and temples alike, the Christian put 
carvings of angels conquering devils; or of 
hero-martyrs exchanging this world for an- 
other; subject inappropriate, I think, to our 
manner of exchange here. And the Master 
of Christians not only left his followers with- 
out any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of 
exchange on the outside of buildings, but gave 
some strong evidence of his dislike of affairs 
of exchange within them. And yet there 
might surely be a heroism in such affairs ; and 
all commerce become a kind of selling of doves 
not impious. The wonder has always been 
great to me, that heroism has never been sup- 
posed to be in anywise consistent with the 
practice of supplying people with food, or 
clothes; but rather with that of quartering 
oneself upon them for food, and stripping 
them of their clothes. Spoiling of armor is 
an heroic deed in all ages; but the selling of 
clothes, old or new, has never taken any color 
of magnanimity. Yet one does not see why 
feeding the hungry and clothing the naked 



\ 



104 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

should ever become base businesses, even 
when engaged in on a large scale. If one could 
contrive to attach the notion of conquest to 
them anyhow? so that, supposing there were 
anywhere an obstinate race, who refused to be 
comforted, one might take some pride in giv- 
ing them compulsory comfort; and as it were, 
"occupying a country" with one's gifts, in- 
stead of one's armies? If one could only con- 
sider it as much a victory to get a barren field 
sown, as to get an earned field stripped ; and 
contend who should build villages, instead of 
who should "carry" them. Are not all forms 
of heroism conceivable in doing these service- 
able deeds? You doubt who is strongest? It 
might be ascertained by push of spade, as well 
as push of sword. Who is wisest? There are 
witty things to be thought of in planning other 
business than campaigns. Who is bravest? 
There are always the elements to fight with, 
stronger than men ; and nearly as merciless. 
The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic 
element in the soldier's work seems to be — that 
he is paid little for it — and regularly : while 
you traffickers, and exchangers, and others oc- 
cupied in presumably benevolent business, like 
to be paid much for it — and by chance. I 
never can make out how it is that a knight- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 105 

errant does not expect to be paid for his 
trouble, but a pedler-errant always does; — that 
people are willing to take hard knocks for 
nothing, but never to sell ribbons cheap; — 
that they are ready to go on fervent crusades j 
to recover the tomb of a buried God, never on/ 
any travels to fulfill the orders of a living! 
God ; — that they will go anywhere barefoot to 
preach their faith, but must be well bribed to 
practice it, and are perfectly ready to give the ■ 
Gospel gratis, but never the loaves and fishes. I 
If you choose to take the matter up on any * 
such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, 
and your feeding of nations, for fixed salaries ; 
and to be as particular about giving people the 
best food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are 
about giving them the best gunpowder, I 
could carve something for you on your ex- 
change worth looking at. But I can only at 
present suggest decorating its frieze with 
pendant purses; and making its pillars broad 
at the base, for the sticking of bills. And in 
the innermost chambers of it there might be a 
statue of Britannia of the Market, who may 
have, perhaps advisably, a partridge for her 
crest, typical at once of her courage in fighting 
for noble ideas; and of her interest in game; 
and round its neck the inscription in golden 

s Crown 



106 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

letters, "Perdix fovit quae non peperit. "* 
Then, for her spear, she might have a weaver's 
beam ; and on her shield, instead of her Cross, 
the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with the town 
of Gennesaret proper, in the field and the 
legend t4 In the best market/' and her corselet, 
of leather, folded over her heart in the shape 
of -a purse, with thirty slits in it for a piece of 
money to go in at, on each day of the month. 
And I doubt not but that people would come 
to see your exchange, and its goddess, with 
applause. 

Nevertheless, I want to point out to you cer- 
tain strange characters in this goddess of yours. 
She differs from the great Greek and Mediaeval 
deities essentially in two things — first, as to 
the continuance of her presumed power; sec- 
ondly, as to the extent of it. 

ist, as to the Continuance. 

The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave contin- 
ual increase of wisdom, as the Christian Spirit 
of Comfort (or Comforter) continual increase 
of comfort. There was no question, with 
these, of any limit or cessation of function. 
But with your Agora Goddess, that is just the 

*Jerem. xvii. (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). "As 
the partridge, fostering what she brought not forth, so 
he that getteth riches not by right, shall leave them in 
the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool." 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 107 

most important question. Getting on — but 
where to? Gathering together — but how 
much? Do you mean to gather always — never 
to spend? If so, I wish you joy of your god- 
dess, for I am just as well off as you, without 
the trouble of worshipping her at all. But if 
you do not spend, somebody else will — some- 
body else must. And it is because of this 
(among many other such errors) that I have 
fearlessly declared your so-called science of 
Political Economy to be no science; because, 
namely, it has omitted the study of exactly 
the most important branch of the business — 
the study of spending. For spend you must, 
and as much as you make, ultimately. You 
gather corn: — will you bury England under a 
heap of grain; or will you, when you have 
gathered, finally eat? You gather gold: — will 
you make your house-roofs of it, or pave 
your streets with it? That is still one 
way of spending it. But if you keep it, 
you may get more, I'll give you more; I'll 
give you all the gold you want — all you can 
imagine — if you can tell me what you'll do 
with it. You shall have thousands of gold 
pieces; — thousands of thousands — millions — 
mountains, of gold: where will you keep them? 
Will you put an Olympus of silver upon a gold- 



108 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

en Pelion — make Ossa like a wart? Do you 
think the rain and dew would then come down 
to you, in the streams from such mountains, 
more blessedly than they will come down the 
mountains which God has made for you, of 
moss and whinstone? But it is not gold that 
you want to gather! What is it? greenbacks? No; 
not those neither. What is it then — is it writ- 
ing ciphers after a capital I? Cannot you prac- 
tice writing ciphers, and write as many as you 
"want? Write ciphers for an hour every morn- 
ing, in a big book, and say every evening, I am 
worth all those naughts more than I was yester- 
day. Won't that do? Well, what in the name 
of Plutus is it you want? Not gold, not green- 
backs, not ciphers after a capital I? You will 
have to answer, after all, i4 No; we want, some- 
how or other, moneys worth." Well, what is 
that? Let your Goddess of Getting-on dis- 
cover it, and let her learn to stay therein. 

II. But there is another question to be asked 
respecting this Goddess of Getting-on. The 
first was of the continuance of her power; the 
second is of its extent. 

Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to 
be all the world's Pallas, and all the world's 
Madonna. They could teach all men, and they 
could comfort all men. But, look strictly into 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 109 

the nature of the power of your Goddess of 
Getting-on; and you will find she is the God- 
dess — not of everybody's getting on — but only 
of somebody's getting on. This is a vital, or 
rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in 
your own ideal of the state of national life 
which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain. 
I asked you what it was, when I was last here; 
you have never told me. Now, shall I try to 
tell you? 

Your ideal of human life then is, I think, 
that it should be passed in a pleasant undulat- 
ing world, with iron and coal everywhere un- 
derneath it. On each pleasant bank of this 
world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two 
wings, and stables, and coach-houses; a mod- 
erately sized park; a large garden and hot- 
houses ; and pleasant carriage drives through 
the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live 
the favored votaries of the Goddess ; the Eng- 
lish gentleman, with his gracious wife, and 
his beautiful family; always able to have the 
boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the 
beautiful ball-dresses for the daughters, and 
hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the 
Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the 
bank, is to be the mill ; not less than a quarter 
of a mile long, with a steam engine at each 



110 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

end, and two in the middle, and a chimney 
three hundred feet high. In this mill are to 
be in constant employment from eight hundred 
to a thousand workers, who never drink, never 
strike, always go to church on Sunday, and 
always express themselves in respectful lan- 
guage. 

Is not that, broadly, and in the main fea- 
tures, the kind of thing you propose to your- 
selves? It is very pretty indeed seen from 
above, not at all so pretty, seen from below. 
For, observe, while to one family this deity is 
indeed the Goddess of Getting- on, to a thou- 
sand families she is the Goddess of not Get- 
ting-on. "Nay, " you say, they have all their 
chance." Yes, so has every one in a lottery, 
but there must always be the same number of 
blanks. "Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill 
and intelligence which take the lead, but blind 
chance." What then' do you think the old 
practice, that "they should take who have the 
power, and they should keep who can," is less 
iniquitous, when the power has become power 
of brains instead of fist? and that, though we 
may not take advantage of a child's or a 
woman's weakness, we may of a man's foolish- 
ness? "Nay, but finally, work must be done, 
and some one must be at the top, some one at 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. Ill 

the bottom. M Granted, my friends. Work 
must always be; and captains of work must 
always be ; and if you in the least remember 
the tone of any of my writings, you must know 
that they are thought unfit for this age, because 
they are insisting on need of government, and 
speaking with scorn of liberty. But I beg you 
to observe that there is a wide difference 
between being captains or governors of work, 
and taking the profits of it. It does not fol- 
low, because you are general of an army, that 
you are to take all the treasure, or land, it 
wins (if it fight for treasure or land) ; neither 
because you are king of a nation, that you are 
to consume all the profits of the nation's work. 
Real kings, on the contrary, are known invari- 
ably by their doing quite the reverse of this, — 
by their taking the least possible quantity of 
the nation's work for themselves. There is 
no test of real knighthood so infallible as that. 
Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely, 
unostentatiously? probably he is a King. 
Does he cover his body with jewels, and his 
table with delicates? in all probability he is 
not a King. It is possible he may be, as Sol- 
omon was; but that is when the nation shares 
bis splendor with him. Solomon made gold, 
not only to be in his own palace as stones, but 



112 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

to be in Jerusalem as stones. But even so, for 
the most part, these splendid kinghoods expire 
in ruin, and only the true kinghoods live, which 
are of royal laborers ; who, both leading rough 
lives, establish the true dynasties. Conclus- 
ively you will find that because you are king 
of a nation, it does not follow that you are to 
gather for yourself all the wealth of that 
nation; neither, because you are king of a 
small part of the nation, and lord over the 
means of its maintenance — over field, or mill, 
or mine, are you to take all the produce of that 
piece of the foundation of national existence 
for yourself. 

You will tell me I need not preach against 
these things, for I cannot mend them. No, 
good friends, I cannot; but you can, and you 
will ; or something else can and will. Do you 
think these phenomena are to stay always in 
their present power or aspect? All history 
shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact 
thing they never can do. Change must come ; 
but it is ours to determine whether change of 
growth, or change of death. Shall the 
Parthenon be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton 
priory in its meadow, but these mills of yours 
be the consummation of the buildings of the 
earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 113 

eternity? Think you that "men may come, 
and men may go," but mills go on forever? 
Not so; out of these, better or worse shall 
come ; and it is for you to choose which. 

I know that none of this wrong is done with 
deliberate purpose. I know, on the contrary, 
that you wish your workmen well ; that you do 
much for them, and that you desire to do more 
for them, if you saw your way to it safely. I 
know that many of you have done, and are 
every day doing, whatever you feel to be in 
your power ; and that even all this wrong and 
misery are brought about by a warped sense of 
duty, each of you striving to do his best, with- 
out noticing that this best is essentially and 
centrally the best for himself, not for others. 
And all this has come of the spreading of that 
thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the 
modern economist, that "To do the best for 
yourself, is finally to do the best for others. ' ' 
Friends, our great Master said not so ; and most 
absolutely we shall find this world is not made 
so. Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally 
to do the best for ourselves ; but it will not do 
to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The 
Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a 
Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, 
perhaps, the last written words of Plato, — if 



114 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

not the last actually written (for thirs we can- 
not know), yet assuredly in fact and power his 
parting words — in which, endeavoring to give 
full crowning and harmonious close to all his 
thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the 
imagined sentence of the Great Spirit, his 
strength and his heart fail him, and the words 
cease, broken off forever. It is the close of 
the dialogue called "Critias," in which he 
describes, partly from real tradition, partly in 
ideal dream, the early state of Athens ; and the 
genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled 
isle of Atlantis ; in which genesis he conceives 
the same first perfection and final degeneracy 
of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition 
is expressed by saying that the Sons of God 
intermarried with the daughters of men, for he 
supposes the earliest race to have been indeed 
the children of God; and to have corrupted 
themselves, until "their spot was not the spot 
of his children. ' ' And this, he says, was the 
end; that indeed "through many generations, 
so long as the God's nature in them yet was 
full, they were submissive to the sacred laws, 
and carried themselves lovingly to all that had 
kindred with them in divineness: for their 
uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in 
every wise great ; so that, in all meekness of 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 115 

wisdom, they dealt with each other, and took 
all the chances of life ; and despising all things 
except virtue, they cared little what happened 
day by day, and bore lightly the burden of 
gold and of possessions ; for they saw that, if 
only their common love and virtue increased, 
all these things would be increased together 
with them ; but to set their esteem and ardent 
pursuit upon material possession would be to 
lose that first, and their virtue and affection 
together with it. And by such reasoning, and 
what of the divine nature remained in them, 
they gained all this greatness of which we have 
already told; but when the God's part of them 
faded and became extinct, being mixed again 
and again, and effaced by the prevalent mor- 
tality; and the human nature at last exceeded, 
they then became unable to endure the 
courses of fortune ; and fell into shapelessness 
of life, and baseness in the sight of him who 
could see, having lost everything that was 
fairest of their honor ; while to the blind hearts 
which could not discern the true life, tending 
to happiness, it seemed that they were then 
chiefly noble and happy, being filled with all 
iniquity of inordinate possession and power. 
Whereupon, the God of Gods, whose Kingdom 
is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus 



116 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

cast into misery, and desiring to lay such pun- 
ishment upon them as might make them repent 
into restraining, gathered together all the gods 
into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's 
center overlooks whatever has part in creation; 
and having assembled them, he said" — 

The rest is silence. So ended are the last 
words of the chief wisdom of the heathen, 
spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; 
this golden image high by measureless cubits, 
set up where your green fields of England are 
furnace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of 
Dura: this idol, forbidden to us, first of all 
idols, by your own Master and faith; forbid- 
den to us also by every human lip that has 
ever, in any age or people, been accounted of 
as able to speak according to the purposes of 
God. Continue to make that forbidden deity 
your principle one, and soon no more art, no 
more science, no more pleasure will be pos- 
sible. Catastrophe will come; or worse than 
catastrophe, slow mouldering and withering 
into Hades. But if you can fix some concep- 
tion of a true human state of life to be striven 
for — life for all men as for yourselves — if you 
can determine some honest and simple order 
of existence; following those trodden ways of 
wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 117 

her quiet and withdrawn paths, which are 
peace; — then, and so sanctifying wealth into 
4 * commonwealth, " all your art, your literature, 
your daily labors, your domestic affection, 
and citizen's duty, will join and increase into 
one magnificent harmony. You will know 
then how to build, well enough ; you will build 
with stone well, but with flesh better; temples 
not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; 
and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is 
indeed eternal. 



LECTURE III. 
WAR. 



119 




"Ragged canvas mixed up with the laths." — Page 123. 

Crown of Wild Olive. 



LECTURE III. 

WAR. 

(Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.) 

Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that 
many of you came unwillingly to-night, and 
many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear 
what a writer on painting could possibly say, 
or would venture to say, respecting your great 
art of war. You may well think within your- 
selves, that a painter might, perhaps without 
immodesty, lecture younger painters upon 
painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor 
young physicians upon medicine — least of all, 
it may seem to you, young warriors upon war. 
And, indeed, when I was asked to address 
you, I declined at first, and declined long; for 
I felt that you would not be interested in my 
special business, and would certainly think 
there was small need for me to come to teach 
you yours. Nay, I knew that there ought to 
be no such need, for the great veteran soldiers 
of England are now men every way so thought- 
ful, so noble, and so good, that no other teach- 
ing than their knightly example, and their few 

121 



122 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

words of grave and tried counsel should be 
either necessary for you, or even, without 
assurance of due modesty in the offerer, en- 
dured by you. 

But being asked, not once nor twice, I have 
not ventured persistently to refuse ; and I will 
try, in very few words, to lay before you some 
reason why you should accept my excuse and 
hear me patiently. You may imagine that 
your work is wholly foreign to, and separate 
from mine. So far from that, all the pure and 
noble arts of peace are founded on war; no 
great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a 
nation of soldiers. There is no art among a 
shepherd people, if it remains at peace. 
There is no art among an agricultural people, 
if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely 
consistent with fine art; but cannot produce 
it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce 
it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of 
it exist. There is no great art possible to a 
nation but that which is based on battle. 

Now, though I hope you love fighting for its 
own sake, you must, I imagine, be surprised 
at my assertion that there is any such good 
fruit of fighting. You supposed, probably, 
that your office was to defend the works of 
peace, but certainly not to found them : nay, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 123 

the common course of war, you may have 
thought, was only to destroy them. And 
truly, I who tell you this of the use of war, 
should have been the last of men to tell you 
so, had I trusted my own experience only. 
Hear why : I have given a considerable part of 
my life to the investigation of Venetian paint- 
ing; and the result of that inquiry was my fix- 
ing upon one man as the greatest of all Vene- 
tians, and therefore, as I believed, of all paint- 
ers, whatsoever. I formed this faith (whether 
right or wrong matters at present nothing), 
in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret, un- 
der a roof covered with his pictures ; and of 
those pictures, three of the noblest were then 
in the form of ragged canvas, mixed up with 
the laths of the roof, rent through by three 
Austrian shells. Now it is not every lecturer 
who could tell you that he had seen three of 
his favorite pictures torn to rags by bomb- 
shells. And after such a sight, it is not every 
lecturer who would tell you that, neverthe- 
less, war was the foundation of all great art. 

Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any 
careful comparison of the states of great his- 
toric races at different periods. Merely to 
show you what I mean, I will sketch for you, 
very briefly, the broad steps of the advance ot 



124 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the best art of the world. The first dawn of 
it is in Egypt ; and the power of it is founded 
on the perpetual contemplation of death, and 
of future judgment, by the mind of a nation 
of which the ruling caste were priests, and the 
second, soldiers. The greatest works pro- 
duced by them are sculptures of their kings 
going out to battle, or receiving the homage 
of conquered armies. And you must remem- 
ber also, as one of the great keys to the splen- 
dor of the Egyptian nation, that the priests 
were not occupied in theology only. Their 
theology was the basis of practical government 
and law; so that they were not so much 
priests as religious judges: the office of 
Samuel, among the Jews, being as nearly as 
possible correspondent to theirs. 

All the rudiments of art then, and much 
taore than the rudiments of all science, are 
laid first by this great warrior-nation, which 
held in contempt all mechanical trades, and in 
absolute hatred the peaceful life of shepherds. 
Prom Egypt art passes directly into Greece, 
Where all poetry, and all painting, are noth- 
ing else than the description, praise, or dra- 
matic representation of war or of the exercises 
which prepare for it, in their connection with 
offices of religion. All Greek institutions had 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 125 

first respect to war; and their conception of it, 
as one necessary office of all human and divine 
life, is expressed simply by the images of their 
guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom 
of the intellect ; he bears the arrow and the 
bow, before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena 
is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is 
by the helmet and the shield, oftener than 
by the shuttle, that she is distinguished from 
other deities. 

There were, however, two great differences 
in principle between the Greek and the Egyp- 
tian theories of policy. In Greece there was 
no soldier caste ; every citizen was necessarily a 
soldier. And, again, while the Greeks rightly 
despised mechanical arts as much as the Egyp- 
tians, they did not make the fatal mistake of 
despising agricultural and pastoral life; but 
perfectly honored both. These two conditions 
of truer thought raise them quite into the 
highest rank of wise manhood that has yet 
been reached; for all our great arts, and 
nearly all our great thoughts, have been bor- 
rowed or derived from them. Take away 
from us what they have given; and I can 
hardly imagine how low the modern European 
would stand. 

Now, you are to remember, in passing to 



126 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the next phase of history, that though you 
must have war to produce art — you must also 
have much more than war; namely, an art-in- 
stinct or genius in the people; and that, 
though all the talent for painting in the world 
won't make painters of you, unless you have a 
gift for fighting, and none for painting. Now, 
in the next great dynasty of soldiers, the art- 
instinct is wholly wanting. I have not yet in- 
vestigated the Roman character enough to tell 
you the causes of this ; but I believe, para- 
doxical as it may seem to you, that, however 
truly the Roman might say of himself that he 
was born of Mars, and suckled by the wolf, 
he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a far- 
mer than a soldier. The exercises of war 
were with him practical, not poetical; his 
poetry was in domestic life only, and the ob- 
ject of battle, "pacis imponere morem." And 
the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do 
not rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, 
there comes back into the mind of Europe a 
passionate delight in war itself, for the sake 
of war. And then, with the romantic knight- 
hood which can imagine no other noble em- 
ployment, — under the fighting kings of France, 
England, and Spain ; and under the fighting 
dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 127 

again, and rises to her height in the great val- 
leys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through 
which there flows not a single stream, from 
all their Alps or Apennines, that did not once 
run dark red from battle; and it reaches its 
culminating glory in the city which gave to 
history the most intense type of soldiership 
yet seen among men ; the city whose armies 
were led in their assault by their king, led 
through it to victory by their king, and so led, 
though that king of theirs was blind, and in 
the extremity of his age. 

And from this time forward, as peace is 
established or extended in Europe, the arts 
decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of 
costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves 
at last on the side of luxury and various cor- 
ruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations, 
wither utterly away ; remaining only in partial 
practice among races who, like the French and 
us, have still the minds, though we cannot all 
live the lives, of soldiers. 

"It may be so, " I can suppose that a philan- 
trophist might exclaim. "Perish then the 
arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost. 
What worth is there in toys of canvas and 
stone, if compared to the joy and peace of art- 
less domestic life?" And the answer is — truly, 



128 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

in themselves, none. But as expressions of 
the highest state of the human spirit, their 
worth is infinite. As results they may be 
worthless, but, as signs, they are above price. 
For it is an assured truth that, whenever the 
faculties of men are at their fulness, they must 
express themselves by art ; and to say that a 
state is without such expression, is to say that 
it is sunk from its proper level of manly 
nature. So that, when I tell you that war is 
the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that 
it is the foundation of all the high virtues and 
faculties of men. 

It was very strange to me to discover this; 
and very dreadful — but I saw it to be quite an 
undeniable fact. The common notion that 
peace and the virtues of civil life flourished to- 
gether, I found to be wholly untenable. Peace 
and the vices of civil life only flourish to- 
gether. We talk of peace and learning, and 
of peace and plenty, and of peace and civiliza- 
tion ; but I found that those were not the 
words which the Muse of History coupled to- 
gether ; that on her lips, the words were — 
peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, 
peace and corruption, peace and death. I 
found, in brief, that all great nations learned 
their truth of word, and strength of thought, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 129 

in war; that they were nourished in war, and 
wasted by peace ; taught by war, and deceived 
by peace; trained by war and betrayed by' 
peace; — in a word, that they were born in war 
and expired in peace. 

Yet now note carefully, in the second place, 
it is not all war of which this can be said — nor 
all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start up 
into men. It is not the ravage of a barbarian 
wolf-flock, as under Genseric or Suwarrow; 
nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of 
mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scot- 
land ; nor the occasional struggle of a strong 
peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of 
the Swiss with Austria, nor the contest of 
merely ambitious nations for extent of power, 
as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or 
the just terminated war in America. None of 
these forms of war build anything but tombs. 
But the creative or foundational war is that in 
which the natural restlessness and love of con- 
test among men are disciplined, by consent, 
into modes of beautiful — though it may be 
fatal — play; in which the natural ambition and 
love of power of men are disciplined into the 
aggressive conquest of surrounding evil ; and 
in which the natural instincts of self-defense 
are sanctified by the nobleness of the institu- 

9 Crown 



130 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

tions, and purity of the households, which they 
are appointed to defend. To such war as this 
all men are born ; in such war as this any man 
may happily die ; and forth from such war as 
this have arisen throughout the extent of past 
ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of 
humanity. 

I shall therefore divide the war of which I 
would speak to you into three heads. War for 
exercise or play ; war for dominion ; and war 
for defense. 

I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I 
speak of it primarily in this light, because 
through all past history, manly war has been 
more an exercise than anything else, among 
the classes who cause, and proclaim it. It is 
not a game to the conscript, or the pressed 
sailor; but neither of these are the causers of 
it. To the governor who determines that war 
shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily 
adopt it as their profession, it has always been 
a grand pastime ; and chiefly pursued because 
they had nothing else to do. And this is true 
without any exception. No king whose mind 
was fully occupied with the development of 
the inner resources of his kingdom, or with 
any other sufficing subject of thought, ever 
entered into war but on compulsion. No youth 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 131 

who was earnestly busy with any peaceful sub- 
ject of study, or set on any serviceable course 
of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier. 
Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture 
or business, in science or in literature, and he 
will never think of war otherwise than as a 
calamity. But leave him idle ; and, the more 
brave and active and capable he is by nature, 
the more he will thirst for some appointed field 
for action ; and find, in the passion and peril 
of battle, the only satisfying fulfilment of his 
unoccupied being. And from the earliest in- 
cipient civilization until now, the population of 
the earth divides itself, when you look at it 
widely, into two races; one of workers, and 
the other of players — one tilling the ground, 
manufacturing, building, and otherwise pro- 
viding for the necessities of life ; — the other 
part proudly idle, and continually therefore 
needing recreation, in which they use the pro- 
ductive and laborious orders partly as their 
cattle and partly as their puppets or pieces in 
the game of death. 

Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodli- 
ness there may be in this game of war, rightly 
played, there is none when you thus play it 
with a multitude of small human pawns. 

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other 



132 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

kingdom, choose to make your pastime of con- 
test, do so, and welcome; but set not up these 
unhappy peasant-pieces upon the green fielded 
board. If the wager is to be of death, lay it 
on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly strug- 
gle in the Olympic dust, though it be the dust 
of the grave, the gods w r ill look upon, and be 
with you in, but they will not be with you, if 
you sit on the sides of the amphitheater, whose 
steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena 
its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into 
gladiatorial war. J You also, you tender and 
delicate women, for whom, and by whose com- 
mand, all true battle has been, and must ever 
be ; you would perhaps shrink now, though you 
need not, from the thought of sitting as queens 
above set lists where the jousting game might 
be mortal. How much more, then, ought you 
to shrink from the thought of sitting above a 
theater pit in which even a few condemned 
slaves were slaying each other only for your 
delight. And do you not shrink from the fact 
of sitting above a theater pit, where, — not 
condemned slaves, — but the best and bravest 
of the poor sons of your people, slay each 
other, — not man to man, — as the coupled glad- 
iators; but race to race, in duel of generations? 
You would tell me, perhaps, that you do not 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 133 

sit to see this; and it is indeed true, that the 
women of Europe — those who have no heart- 
interest of their own at peril in the contest — 
draw the curtains of their boxes, and muffle 
the openings; so that from the pit of the circus 
of slaughter there may reach them only at inter- 
vals a half-heard cry and a murmur as of the 
wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire. 
They shut out the death-cries; and are happy, 
and talk wittily among themselves. That is 
the utter literal fact of what our ladies do in 
their pleasant lives. 

Nay, you might answer, speaking for them 
— "We do not let these wars come to pass for 
our play, nor by our carelessness; we cannot 
help them. How can any final quarrel of na- 
tions be settled otherwise than by war?" I 
cannot now delay, to tell you how political 
quarrels might be otherwise settled. But 
grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of 
reason can be understood by nations ; no law 
of justice submitted to by them; and that, 
while questions of a few acres, and of petty 
cash, can be determined by truth and equity, 
the questions which are to issue in the perish- 
ing or saving of kingdoms can be determined 
only by the truth of the sword, and the equity 
of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge 



134 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

if it will always be necessary for you to put 
your quarrel into the hearts of your poor, and 
sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You 
would be ashamed to do this in your own pri- 
vate position and power. Why should you not 
be ashamed also to do it in public place and 
power? If you quarrel with your neighbor, 
and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and 
mortal, you and he do not send your footmen 
to Battersea fields to fight it out; nor do you 
set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their 
goods. You fight our your quarrel yourselves, 
and at your own danger, if at all. And you do 
not think it materially affects the arbitrament 
that one of you has a larger household than 
the other ; so that, if the servants or tenants 
were brought into the field with their masters, 
the issue of the contest could not be doubtful? 
You either refuse the private duel, or you 
practice it under laws of honor, not of physical 
force; that so it may be, in a manner, justly 
concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion 
of the private feud is of little moment, while 
the just or unjust conclusion of the public feud 
is of eternal moment; and yet, in this public 
quarrel, you take your servants' sons from 
their arms to fight for it, and your servants' 
food from their lips to support it; and the 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 135 

black seals on the parchment of your treaties of 
peace are the deserted hearth and the fruit- 
less field. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in 
this, as there is mostly in these wide and uni- 
versal crimes. Hear the statement of the very 
fact of it in the most literal words of the great- 
est of our English thinkers : — 

"What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the 
net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowl- 
edge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British 
village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. 
From these, by certain 'natural enemies' of the French, 
there are successively selected, during the French war, 
say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own 
expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not 
without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, 
and ever trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, 
another build, another hammer, and the weakest can 
stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, 
amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected ; 
all dressed in red, and shipped away, at the public 
charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the 
south of Spain, and fed there till wanted. 

"And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are 
thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dum- 
drudge, in like manner wending ; till at length, after in- 
finite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtapose 
tion; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a 
gun in his hand. 

"Straightway the word 'Fire!' is given, and they blow 
the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk 
useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, 



136 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

which it must bury, and anon shed tears for. Had 
these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the 
smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the 
entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe, there 
was even unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual 
helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! 
their governors had fallen out ; and instead of shooting 
one another, had the cunning to make these poor block- 
heads shoot." (Sartor Resartus.) 

Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of 
battle must not, and shall not, ultimately be 
played this way. But should it be played any 
way? Should it, if not by your servants, be 
practiced by yourselves? I think, yes. Both 
history and human instinct seem alike to say, 
yes. All healthy men like fighting, and like 
the sense of danger ; all brave women like to 
hear of their fighting, and of their facing dan- 
ger. This is a fixed instinct in the fine race of 
them; and I cannot help fancying that fair 
fight is the best play for them ; and that a tour- 
nament was a better game than a steeple- 
chase. The time may perhaps come in France 
as well as here, for universal hurdle-races and 
cricketing; but I do not think universal ll crick- 
ets' ' will bring out the best qualities of the 
nobles of either country. I use, in such ques- 
tion, the test which I have adopted, of the con- 
nection of war with other arts; and I reflect 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 137 

how, as a sculptor, I should feel, if I were 
asked to design a monument for a dead knight, 
in Westminster Abbey, with a carving of a bat 
at one end, and a ball at the other. It may be 
the remains in me only of savage Gothic preju- 
dice ; but I had rather carve it with a shield at 
one end, and a sword at the other. And this, 
observe, with no reference whatever to any 
story of duty done, or cause defended. As- 
sume the knight merely to have ridden out oc- 
casionally to get his neighbor for exercise; 
assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to 
have gained his bread, and filled his purse, at 
the sword's point. Still I feel as if it were, 
somehow, grander and worthier in him to 
have made his bread by sword play than any 
other play ; I had rather he had made it by 
thrusting than batting; — much more, than by 
betting. Much rather that he should ride war 
horses, than back race horses, and — I say it 
sternly and deliberately — much rather would I 
have him slay his neighbor, than cheat him. 

But remember, so far as this may be true, 
the game of war is only that in which the full 
personal power of the human creature is 
brought out in management of its weapons. 
And this for three reasons : — 

First, the great justification of this game is 

10 Crown 



188 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

that it truly, when well played, determines 
who is the best man ; — who is the highest bred, 
the most self-denying, the most fearless, the 
coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and hand. 
You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless 
there is a clear possibility of the struggle's 
ending in death. It is only in the fronting of 
that condition that the full trial of the man, 
soul and body, comes out. You may go to 
your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or of 
cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay 
unchallenged all the while. But if the play 
may be ended at any moment by a lance- 
thrust, a man will probably make up his ac- 
counts a little before he enters it. Whatever 
is rotten and evil in him will weaken his hand 
more in holding a sword hilt, than in balancing 
a billiard cue ; and, on the whole, the habit of 
living lightly hearted, in daily presence of 
death, always has had, and must have, a ten- 
dency both to the making and testing of hon- 
est men. But for the final testing, observe, 
you must make the issue of battle strictly de- 
pendent on fineness of frame, and firmness of 
hand. You must not make it the question, 
which of the combatants has the longest gun, 
or which has got behind the biggest tree, or 
which has the wind in his face, or which has 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 139 

gunpowder made by best chemists, or iron 
smelted with the best coal, or the angriest 
mob at his back. Decide your battle, whether 
of nations, or individuals, on those terms ; — 
and you have only multiplied confusion, and 
added slaughter to iniquity. But decide your 
battle by pure trial which has the strongest 
arm, and steadiest heart, — and you have gone 
far to decide a great many matters besides,, 
and to decide them rightly. 

And the other reasons for this mode of deci- 
sion of cause, are the diminution both of the 
material destructiveness, or cost, and of the 
physical distress of war. For you must not 
think that in speaking to you in this (as you 
may imagine) fantastic praise of battle, I have 
overlooked the conditions weighing against 
me. I pray all of you, who have not read, to 
read with the most earnest attention, Mr. 
Helps' two essays on War and Government, 
in the first volume of the last series of 
il Friends in Counsel." Everything that can 
be urged against war is there simply, exhaus- 
tively, and most graphically stated. And all, 
there urged, is true. But the two great counts 
of evil alleged against war by this most 
thoughtful writer, hold only against modern 
war. If you have to take away masses of men 



140 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

from all industrial employment, — to feed them 
hj the labor of others, — to move them and pro- 
vide them with destructive machines, varied 
daily in national rivalship of inventive cost ; if 
you have to ravage the country which you at- 
tack, — to destroy for a score of future years, 
its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbors; — 
and if, finally, having brought masses of men, 
-counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, 
you tear those masses to pieces with jagged 
shot, and leave the fragments of living crea- 
tures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, 
to starve and parch, through days of torture, 
down into clots of clay — what book of accounts 
shall record the cost of your work; — What 
book of judgment sentence the guilt of it? 

That, I say, is modern war, — scientific war, 
— chemical and mechanic war, worse even 
than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet 
you will tell me, perhaps, that any other war 
than this is impossible now. It may be so; 
the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be 
-otherwise registered than by new facilities of 
destruction; and the brotherly love of our 
enlarging Christianity be only proved by mul- 
tiplication of murder. Yet hear, for a moment, 
"what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days ; — 
what war might yet be, if we could extinguish 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 141 

our science in darkness, and join the heathen's, 
practice to the Christian's theory. I read yoti 
this from a book which probably most of yott 
know well, and all ought to know — Muller's 
"Dorians;" — but I have put the points 1 wish 
you to remember in closer connection than in 
his text. 

"The chief characteristic of the warriors of 
Sparta was great composure and subdued 
strength; the violence of Aristodemus and 
Isadas being considered as deserving rather of 
blame than praise; and these qualities in 
general distinguished the Greeks from the 
northern Barbarians, whose boldness always 
consisted in noise and tumult. For the same 
reason the Spartans sacrificed to the Muses; 
before an action; these goddesses being ex* 
pected to produce regularity and order in 
battle ; as they sacrificed on the same occasion 
in Crete to the god of love, as the confirmer of 
mutual esteem and shame. Every man put 
on a crown, when the band of flute-players 
gave the signal for attack; all the shields of 
the line glittered with their high polish, and 
mingled their splendor with the dark red of 
the purple mantles, which were meant both to 
adorn the combatant, and to conceal the bl6od 
of the wounded; to fall well and decorously 



142 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

being an incentive the more to the most heroic 
valor. The conduct of the Spartans in battle 
denotes a high and noble disposition, which 
rejected all the extremes of brutal rage. The 
pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory 
was completed ; and after the signal for retreat 
had been given, all hostilities ceased. The 
spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, 
was also interdicted; and the consecration of 
the spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in 
general, all rejoicings for victory, were con- 
sidered as ill-omened. " 

Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who 
prayed to heathen gods. What Christian war 
is, preached by Christian ministers, let any 
one tell you who saw the sacred crowning, and 
heard the sacred flute-playing, and was 
inspired and sanctified by the divinely-meas- 
ured and musical language, of any North 
American regiment preparing for its charge. 
And what is the relative cost of life in Pagan 
and Christian wars, let this one fact tell you: 
— the Spartans won the decisive battle of 
Corinth with the loss of eight men ; the victors 
at indecisive Gettysburg confess to the loss of 
30,000. 

II. I pass now to our second order of 
war, the commonest among men, that under- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 143 

taken in desire of dominion. And let me ask 
you to think for a few moments what the real 
meaning of this desire of dominion is — first in 
the minds of kings — then in that of nations. 

Now, mind you this first, — that I speak either 
about kings, or masses of men, with a fixed 
conviction that human nature is a noble and 
beautiful thing; not a foul nor a base thing. 
All the sin of men I esteem as their disease, 
not their nature ; as a folly which may be pre- 
vented, not a necessity which must be accepted. 
And my wonder, even when things are at their 
worst, is always at the height which this 
human nature can attain. Thinking it high, I 
find it always a higher thing than I thought it ; 
while those who think it low, find it, and will 
find it, always lower than they thought it : the 
fact being, that it is infinite, and capable of 
infinite height and infinite fall; but the 
nature of it — and here is the faith which I 
would have you hold with me — the nature of it 
is in the nobleness, not in the catastrophe. 

Take the faith in its utmost terms. When 
the captain of the " London* ' shook hands with 
his mate saying "God speed you! I will go 
down with my passengers," that I believe to 
be "human nature. " He does not do it from 
any religious motive — from any hope of reward, 



144 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

pr any fear of punishment ; he does it because 
he is a man. But when a mother, living 
among the fair fields of merry England, gives 
her two-year-old child to be suffocated under a 
mattress in her inner room, while the said 
mother waits and talks outside ; that I believe 
to be not human nature. You have the two 
extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and 
mothers, who are here face to face with me 
to-night, I call upon you to say which of these 
is human, and which is inhuman — which 
"natural," and which "unnatural?" Choose 
your creed at once, I beseech you: — choose 
it with unshaken choice — choose it forever. 
Will you take, for foundation of act and hope, 
the faith that this man was such as God made 
him or that this woman was such as God made 
her? Which of them has failed from their 
nature — from their present, possible, actual 
nature; — not their nature of long ago, but 
their nature of now? Which has betrayed it — 
falsified it? Did the guardian who died in 
his trust die inhumanly, and as a fool; and 
did the murderess of her child fulfil the law 
of her being? Choose, I say; infinitude of 
choices hang upon this. You have had false 
prophets among you — for centuries you have 
had them — solemnly warned against them 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 145 

though you were; false prophets, who have 
told you that all men are nothing but fiends or 
wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe that, 
and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse 
that, and have faith that God "made you up- 
right, " though you have sought out many 
inventions; so you will strive daily to become 
more what your Maker meant and means you 
to be, and daily gives you also the power to 
be — and you will cling more and more to the 
nobleness and virtue that is in you, saying, 
"My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let 
it go." 

I have put this to you as a choice, as if you 
might hold either of these creeds you liked 
best. But there is in reality no choice for you ; 
the facts being quite easily ascertainable. 
You have no business to think about this mat- 
ter, or to choose in it. The broad fact is, that 
a human creature of the highest race, and 
most perfect as a human thing, is invariably 
both kind and true ; and that as you lower the 
race, you get cruelty and falseness, as you get 
deformity : and this so steadily and assuredly, 
that the two great words which, in their first 
use, meant only perfection of race, have come, 
by consequence of the invariable connection of 

virtue with the fine human nature both to 
10 



146 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

signify benevolence of disposition. The word 
generous, and the word gentle, both, in their 
origin, meant only "of pure race/' but because 
charity and tenderness are inseparable from 
this purity of blood, the words which once 
stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms 
for virtue. 

Now, this being the true power of our 
inherent humanity, and seeing that all the 
aim of education should be to develop this ; — 
and seeing also what magnificent self-sacrifice 
the higher classes of men are capable of, for 
any cause that they understand or feel, — it is 
wholly inconceivable to me how well-educated 
princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the 
gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, 
and whose title of royalty means only their 
function of doing every man * 4 right* ' — how 
these, I say, throughout history, should so 
rarely pronounce themselves on the side of the 
poor and of justice, but continually maintain 
themselves and their own interests by oppres- 
sion of the poor, and by wrestling of justice ; 
and how this should tie accepted as so natural, 
that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness 
to law, is used as if it were only the duty of a 
people to be loyal to their king, and not the 
duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 147 

people. How comes it to pass that a captain 
will die with his passengers, and lean over the 
gunwale to give the parting boat its course ; 
but that a king will not usually die with, much 
less for, his passengers, — thinks it rather 
incumbent on his passengers, in any number, 
to die for him? Think, I beseech you, of the 
wonder of this. The sea captain, not captain 
by divine right, but only by company's 
appointment ; — not a man of royal descent, but 
only a plebeian who can steer; — not with the 
eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble 
chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name 
being ever heard above the wash of the fatal 
waves ; — not with the cause of a nation resting 
on his act, but helpless to save so much as a 
child from among the lost crowd with whom he 
resolves to be lost, — yet goes down quietly to 
his grave, rather than break his faith to these 
few emigrants. But your captain by divine 
right, — your captain with the hues of a hun- 
dred shields of kings upon his breast, — your 
captain whose every deed, brave or base, will be 
illuminated or branded forever before unes- 
capable eyes of men,— your captain whose 
every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, 
from sunrising to setting, blessing as the sun- 
shine, or shadowing as the night, — this cap- 



148 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

tain, as you find him in history, for the most 
part thinks only how he may tax his passen- 
gers, and sit at most ease in his state cabin ! 

For observe, if there had been indeed in the 
hearts of the rulers of great multitudes of men 
any such conception of work for the good of 
those under their command, as there is in the 
good and thoughtful masters of any small com- 
pany of men, not only wars for the sake of 
mere increase of power could never take place, 
but our idea of power itself would be entirely 
altered. Do you suppose that to think and 
act even for a million of men, to hear their 
complaint, watch their weaknesses, restrain 
their vices, make laws for them, lead them, 
day by day, to purer life, is not enough for 
one man's work? If any of us were absolute 
lord only of a district of a hundred miles 
square, and were resolved on doing our utmost 
for it; making it feed as large a number of 
people as possible ; making every clod produc- 
tive, and every rock defensive, and every 
human being happy; should we not have 
enough on our hands think you? But if the 
ruler has any other aim than this ; if, careless 
of the result of his interference, he desire only 
the authority to interfere ; and, regardless of 
what is ill-done or well-done, cares only that it 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 149 

shall be done at his bidding; — if he would 
rather do two hundred miles' space of mischief, 
than one hundred miles' space of good, of 
course he will try to add to his territory ; and 
to add inimitably. But does he add to his 
power? Do you call it power in a child, if he 
is allowed to play with the wheels and bands 
of some vast engine, pleased with their mur- 
mur and whirl, till his unwise touch, wander- 
ing where it ought not, scatters beam and 
wheel into ruin? Yet what machine is so vast, 
so incognizable, as the working of the mind of 
a nation; what child's touch so wanton, as the 
word of a selfish king? And yet, how long 
have we allowed the historian to speak of the 
extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just 
ground for his pride ; and to extol him as the 
greatest prince, who is only the center of the 
widest error. Follow out this thought by 
yourselves; and you will find that all power, 
properly so called, is wise and benevolent. 
There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship 
to destroy a fleet ; there may be venom enough 
in a dead body to infect a nation : — but which 
of you, the most ambitious, would desire a 
drifting kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or 
a poison-dipped scepter whose touch was mor- 
tal? There is no true potency, remember, but 



150 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

that of help; no true ambition, but ambition 
to save. 

And then, observe farther, this true power, 
the power of saving, depends neither on mul- 
titude of men, nor on extent of territory. We 
are continually assuming that nations become 
strong according to their numbers. They in- 
deed become so, if those numbers can be made 
of one mind ; but how are you sure you can 
stay them in one mind, and keep them from 
having north and south minds? Grant them 
unanimous, how know you they will be unani- 
mous in right? If they are unanimous in 
wrong, the more they are, essentially the 
weaker they are. Or, suppose that they can 
neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but 
can only be of no mind? Suppose they are a 
mere helpless mob ; tottering into precipitant 
catastrophe, like a wagon load of stones when 
the wheel comes off. Dangerous enough for 
their neighbors, certainly, but not i4 powerful. " 

Neither doest strength depend on extent of 
territory, any more than upon number of popu- 
lation. Take up your maps when you go 
home this evening, — put the cluster of British 
Isles beside the mass of South America; and 
then consider whether any race of men need 
care how much ground they stand upon. The 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 151 

strength is in the men, and in their unity and 
virtue, not in their standing room: a little 
group of wise hearts is better than a wilder- 
ness full of fools; and only that nation gains 
true territory, which gains itself. 

And now for the brief practical outcome of 
all this. Remember, no government is ulti- 
mately strong, but in proportion to its kind- 
ness and justice; and that a nation does not 
strengthen, by merely multiplying and diffus- 
ing itself. We have not strengthened, as yet, 
by multiplying into America. Nay, even 
when it has not to encounter the separating 
conditions of emigration, a nation need not 
boast itself of multiplying on its own ground, 
if it multiplies only as flies or locusts do, with 
the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its 
strength only by increasing as one great fam- 
ily, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood. 
And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by 
seizing dominion over races whom it cannot 
benefit. Austria is not strengthened, but 
weakened, by her grasp of Lombardy; and 
whatever apparent increase of majesty and of 
wealth may have accrued to us from the pos- 
session of India, whether these prove to us 
ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly 
on the degree in which our influence on the 



152 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

native race shall be benevolent and exalting. 
But, as it is at their own peril that any race 
extends their dominion in mere desire of 
power, so it is at their own still greater peril 
that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, 
according to their force, whenever they are 
assured that their authority would be helpful 
and protective. Nor need you listen to any 
sophistical objection of the impossibility of 
knowing when a people's help is needed, or 
when not. Make your national conscience 
clean, and your national eyes will soon be 
clear. No man who is truly ready to take part 
in a noble quarrel will ever stand long in 
doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is 
needed. I hold it my duty to make no politi- 
cal statement of any special bearing in this 
presence ; *but I tell you broadly and boldly, 
that, within these last ten years, we English 
have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs; we 
have fought where we should not have fought, 
for gain ; and we have been passive where we 
should not have been passive, for fear. I tell 
you that the principle of non-intervention, as 
now preached among us, is as selfish and 
cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and 
differs from it only by being not only malign- 
ant, but dastardly. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 153 

I know, however, that my opinions on this 
subject differ too widely from those ordinarily 
held, to be any farther intruded upon you; 
and therefore I pass lastly to examine the 
conditions of the third kind of noble war ; — 
war waged simply for the defense of the 
country in which we were born, and for the 
maintenance and execution of her laws, by 
whomsoever threatened or defied. It is to this 
duty that I suppose most men entering the 
army consider themselves in reality to be 
bound, and I want you now to reflect what the 
laws of mere defense are ; and what the sol- 
dier's duty, as now understood, or supposed to 
be understood. You have solemnly devoted 
yourselves to be English soldiers, for the guar 
dianship of England. I want you to feel what 
this vow of yours indeed means, or is gradually 
coming to mean. You take it upon you, first, 
while you are sentimental schoolboys ; you go 
into your military convent, or barracks, just 
as a girl goes into her convent while she is a 
sentimental schoolgirl; neither of you then 
know what you are about, though both the 
good soldiers and good nuns make the best of 
it afterward. You don't understand perhaps 
why I call you " sentimental' ' schoolboys, 
when you go into the army? Because, on the 



154 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

whole, it is love of adventure, of excitement, 
of fine dress and of the pride of fame, a51 
which are sentimental motives, which chiefly 
make a boy like going into the Guards better 
than into a counting house. You fancy, per- 
haps, that there is a severe sense ox duty 
mixed with these peacocky motives? And in 
the best of you, there is ; but do not think that 
it is principal. If you cared to do your duty 
to your country in a prosaic and unsentimental 
way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty 
to be done in raising harvests, than in burn- 
ing them; more in building houses, than in 
shelling them — more in winning money by 
your own work, wherewith to help men, than 
in taxing other people's work, for money 
wherewith to slay men ; more duty, finally, in 
honest and unselfish living than in honest and 
unselfish dying, though that seems to your 
boys' eyes the bravest. So far then, as for 
your own honor and the honor of your fam- 
ilies, you choose brave death in a red coat be- 
fore brave life in a black one, you are senti- 
mental ; and now see what this passionate vow 
of yours comes to. For a little while you 
ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you 
shoot, and are shot; you are happy, and 
proud, always, and honored and wept if you 



THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 155 

die ; and you are satisfied with your life, and 
with the end of it; believing, on the whole, 
that good rather than harm of it comes to 
others, and much pleasure to you. But as the 
sense of duty enters into your forming minds, 
the vow takes another aspect. You find that 
you have put yourselves into the hand of your 
country as a weapon. You have vowed to 
strike, when she bids you, and to stay scab- 
barded when she bids you ; all that you need 
answer for is, that you fail not in her graspo 
And there is goodness in this, and greatness, 
if you can trust the hand and heart of the 
Britomart who has braced you to her side, and 
are assured that when she leaves you sheathed 
in darkness, there is no need for your flash to 
the sun. But remember, good and noble as 
this state may be, it is a state of slavery. 
There are different kinds of slaves and differ- 
ent masters. Some slaves are scourged to 
their work by whips, others are scourged to it 
by restlessness or ambition. It does not mat- 
ter what the whip is ; it is none the less a whip, 
because you have cut thongs for it out of your 
own souls : the fact, so far, of slavery, is in 
being driven to your work without thought, at 
another's bidding. Again, some slaves are 
bought with money, and others with praise. 



156 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

It matters not what the purchase-money is. 
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a 
price, and be bought for it. Again, it mat- 
ters not what kind of work you are set on ; 
some slaves are set to forced diggings, others 
to forced marches; some dig furrows, others 
field-work, and others graves. Some press the 
juice of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and 
some the blood of men. The fact of the cap- 
tivity is the same whatever work we are set 
upon, though the fruits of the toil may be 
different. But, remember, in thus vowing 
ourselves to be the slaves of any master, it 
ought to be some subject of forethought with 
us, what work he is likely to put us upon. 
You may think that the whole duty of a sol- 
dier is to be passive, that it is the country you 
have left behind who is to command, and you 
have only to obey. But are you sure that you 
have left all your country behind, or that the 
part of it you have so left is indeed the best 
part of it? Suppose — and, remember, it is 
quite conceivable — that you yourselves are in- 
deed the best part of England ; that you, who 
have become the slaves, ought to have been 
the masters ; and that those who are the mas- 
ters, ought to have been the slaves ! If it is a 
noble and whole-hearted England, whose bid- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 157 

ding you are bound to do, it is well ; but if 
you are yourselves the best of her heart, and 
the England you have left be but a half- 
hearted England, how say you of your obedi- 
ence? You were too proud to become shop- 
keepers: are you satisfied then to become ser- 
vants of shopkeepers? You were too proud to 
become merchants or farmers yourselves : will 
you have merchants or farmers then for your 
field marshals? You have no gifts of special 
grace for Exeter Hall: will you have some 
gifted person thereat for your commander-in- 
chief, to judge of your work, and reward? 
You imagine yourselves to be the army of 
England : how if you should find yourselves, 
at last, only the police of her manufacturing 
towns, and the beadles of her little Bethels? 

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for 
ever; but what I want you to see, and to be 
assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is 
not mere passive obedience and bravery; that, 
so far from this, no country is in a healthy 
state which has separated, even in a small de- 
gree, her civil from ner military power. All 
states of the world, however great, fall at once 
when they use mercenary armies; and 
although it is a less instant form of error (be- 
cause involving no national taint of coward- 



158 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

ice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal 
— it is the error especially of modern times, of 
which we cannot yet know all the calamitous 
consequences — to take away the best blood and 
strength of the nation, all the soul- substance 
of it that is brave, and careless of reward, and 
scornful of pain, and faithful in trust ; and to 
cast that into steel, and make a mere sword 
of it ; taking away its voice and will ; but to 
keep the worst part of the nation — whatever is 
cowardly, avaricious, sensual, and faithless — 
and to give to this the voice, to this the autho- 
rity, to this the chief privilege, where there is 
least capacity of thought. The fulfillment 
of your vow for the defense of England will by 
no means consist in carrying out such a sys- 
tem. You are not true soldiers, if you only 
mean to stand at a shop door, to protect shop- 
boys who are cheating inside. A soldier's 
vow to his country is that he will die for the 
guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her 
righteous laws, and of her anyway challenged 
or endangered honor. A state without virtue, 
without laws, and without honor, he is bound 
not to defend ; nay, bound to redress by his 
own right hand that which he sees to be base 
in her. So sternly is the law of Nature and 
life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 159 

be redeemed by a military despotism — never 
by talking, nor by its free effort. And the 
health of any state consists simply in this : that 
in it, those who are wisest shall also be strong- 
est ; its rulers should be also its soldiers ; or, 
rather, by force of intellect more than of 
sword, it£ soldiers its rulers. Whatever the 
- hold which the aristocracy of England has on 
the heart of England, in that they are still 
always in front of her battles, this hold will 
not be enough, unless they are also in front of 
her thoughts. And truly her thoughts need 
good captain's reading now, if ever! Do you 
know what, by this beautiful division of labor 
(her brave men fighting, and her cowards 
thinking), she has come at last to think? Here 
is a bit of paper in my hand*, a good one too, 
and an honest one ; quite representative of the 
best common public thought of England at 
this moment ; and it is holding forth in one of 



* I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because 
the article was unworthy of its general tone, though in 
order to enable the audience to verify the quoted sen- 
tence, I left the number containing it on the table, when 
I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's, 
quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in 
the Daily Telegraph of January n, 1866, summarily 
digests and presents the maximum folly of modern 
thought in this respect "Civilization," says the Baron, 
"is the economy of power, and English power is coal." 
Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is 



160 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

its leaders upon our " social warfare" — upon 
our "vivid life" — upon the "political suprem- 
acy of Great Britain." And what do you 
think all these are owing to? To what our 
English sires have done for us, and taught us, 
age after age? No; not to that. To our 
honesty of heart, or coolness of head, or steadi- 
ness of will? No: not to these. To our think- 
ers, or our statesmen, or our poets, or our cap- 
tains, or our martyrs, or the patient labor of 
our poor? No: not to these; or at least not to 
these in any chief measure. Nay, says the 
journal, "more than any agency, it is the 
cheapness and abundance of our coal which 
have made us what we are. " If it be so, then, 
"ashes to ashes" be our epitaph! and thesooner 
the better. I tell you, gentlemen of England, if 
ever you would have your country breathe the 
pure breath of heaven again, and receive again 
a soul into her body, instead of rotting into a 
carcass, blown up in the belly with carbolic 
acid (and great that waj^), you must think, and 
feel, for your England, as well as fight for her: 

the making of civil persons, which is a kind of distilla- 
tion of which alembics are incapable, and does not at all 
imply the turning of a small company of gentlemen 
into a large company of ironmongers. And English 
power (what little of it may be left), is by no means 
coal, but, indeed, of that which, "when the whole world 
turns to coal, then chiefly lives." 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 161 

you must teach her that all the true greatness 
she ever had, or ever can have, she won while 
her fields were green and her faces ruddy — 
that greatness is still possible for Englishmen, 
even though the ground be not hollow under 
their feet, nor the sky black over their heads ; 
and that, when the day comes for their country 
to lay her honors in the duot, her crest will 
not rise from it more loftily because it is dust 
of coal. Gentlemen, I tell you, solemnly, that 
the day is coming when the soldiers of Eng- 
land must be her tutors ; and the captains of 
her army, captains also of her mind. 

And now, remember, you soldier youths, 
who are thus in all ways the hope of your 
country ; or must be, if she have any hope : 
remember that your fitness for all future trust 
depends upon what you are now. No good 
sohlier in his old age was ever careless or 
indolent in his youth. Many a giddy and 
thoughtless boy has become a good bishop, 
or a good lawyer, or a good merchant ; but no 
such an one ever became a good general. I 
challenge you, in all history, to find a record 
of a good soldier who was not grave and 
earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have 
no patience with people who talk about "the 
thoughtlessness of youth' ' indulgently. I had 

11 Crown 



162 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

infinitely rather hear of thoughtless old age, 
and the indulgence due to that. When a man 
has done his work, and nothing can any way 
be materially altered in his fate, let him for- 
get his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will ; 
but what excuse can you find for wilfulness 
of thought, at the very time when every crisis 
of future fortune hangs on your decisions? A 
youth thoughtless ! when all the happiness of 
his home forever depends on the chances, or 
the passions, of an hour! A youth thoughtless! 
when the career of all his days depends on the 
opportunity of a moment ! A youth thought- 
less ! when his every act is a foundation-stone 
of future conduct, and every imagination a 
fountain of life or death ! Be thoughtless in 
any after years, rather than now — though? 
indeed, there is only one place where a man 
may be nobly thoughtless, — his death-bed. 
No thinking should ever be left to be done 
there. 

Having, then, resolved that you will not 
waste recklessly, but earnestly use, these early 
days of yours, remember that all the duties 
of her children to England may be summed 
in two words — industry, and honor. I say first, 
industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are 
especially tempted to fall. Yet, surely, there 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 163 

is no reason, because your life may possibly or 
probably be shorter than other men's, that 
you should therefore waste more recklessly the 
portion of it that is granted you ; neither do 
the duties of your profession, which require 
you to keep your bodies strong, in any wise 
involve the keeping of your minds weak. So 
far from that, the experience, the hardship, 
and the activity of a soldier's life render his 
powers of thought more accurate than those of 
other men; and while, for others, all knowl- 
edge is often little more than a means of 
amusement, there is no form of science which 
a soldier may not at some time or other find 
bearing on business of life and death. A 
young mathematician may be excused for lan- 
guor in studying curves to be described only 
with a pencil ; but not in tracing those which 
are to be described with a rocket. Your 
knowledge of a wholesome herb may involve 
the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with 
an obscure point of geography, the success of 
a campaign. Never waste an instant's time, 
therefore; the sin of idleness is a thousand- 
fold greater in you than in other youths; for 
the fates of those who will one day be under 
your command hang upon your knowledge; 
lost moments now will be lost lives then, and 



164 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

every instant which you carelessly take for 
play, you buy with blood. But there is one 
way of wasting time, of all the vilest, because 
it wastes, not time only, but the interest and 
energy of your minds. Of all the ungentle- 
manly habits into which you can fall, the vilest 
is betting, or interesting yourselves in the 
issues of betting. It unites nearly every con- 
dition of folly and vice ; you concentrate your 
interest upon a matter of chance, instead of 
upon a subject of true knowledge; and you 
back opinions which you have no grounds for 
forming, merely because they are your own. 
All the insolence of egotism is in this; and so 
far as the love of excitement is complicated 
with the hope of winning money, you turn 
yourselves into the basest sort of tradesmen — 
those who live by speculation. Were there no 
other ground for industry, this would be a 
sufficient one ; that it protected you from the 
temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work 
faithfully, and you will put yourselves in 
possession of a glorious and enlarging happi- 
ness ; not such as can be won by the speed of 
a horse, or marred by the obliquity of a ball. 

First, then, by industry you must fulfil your 
vow to your country; but all industry and 
earnestness will be useless unless they are con- 



t 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 165 

secrated by your resolution to be in all things 
men of honor ; not honor in the common sense 
only, but in the highest. Rest on the force of 
the two main words in the great verse, integer 
vitae, scelerisque purus. You have vowed your 
life to England; give it her wholly — a bright, 
stainless, perfect life — a knightly life. Be- 
cause you have to fight with machines instead 
of lances, there may be a necessity for more 
ghastly danger, but there is none for less 
worthiness of character, than in olden time. 
You may be true knights yet, though perhaps 
not equites; you may have to call yourselves 
"cannonry" instead of ''chivalry, " but that is 
no reason why you should not call yourselves 
true men. So the first thing you have to see 
to in becoming soldiers is that you make your- 
selves wholly true. Courage is a mere matter 
of course among any ordinarily well-born 
youths; but neither truth nor gentleness is 
matter of course. You must bind them like 
shields about your necks ; you must write them 
on the tables of your hearts. Though it be 
not exacted of you, yet exact it of yourselves, 
this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, 
if you leave them unstirred, as tombs in which 
a god lies buried. Vow yourselves crusaders 
to redeem that sacred sepulcher. And remem- 



166 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

ber, before all things — for no other memory 
will be so protective of you — that the highest 
law of this knightly truth is that under which 
it is vowed to women. Whomsoever else you 
deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever 
you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor 
injure, nor leave unaided, according to your 
power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe 
me, every virtue of the higher phases of 
manly character begins in this; — in truth and 
modesty before the face of all maidens; in 
truth and pity, or truth and reverence, to all 
womanhood. 

And now let me turn for a moment to you, — 
wives and maidens, who are the souls of 
soldiers; to you, — mothers, who have devoted 
your children to the great hierarchy of war. 
Let me ask you to consider what part you have 
to take for the aid of those who love you ; for 
if you fail in your part they cannot fulfil theirs; 
such absolute helpmates you are that no man 
can stand without that help, nor labor in his 
own strength. 

I know your hearts, and that the truth of 
them never fails when an hour of trial comes 
which you recognize for such. But you know 
not when the hour of trial first finds you, nor 
when it verily finds you. You imagine that 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 167 

you are only called upon to wait and suffer; 
to surrender and to mourn. You know that you 
must not weaken the hearts of your husbands 
and lovers, even by the one fear of which 
those hearts are capable, — the fear of parting ■ 
from you, or of causing you grief. Through I 
weary years of separation; through fearful 
expectancies of unknown fate; through the 
tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might 
so easily have been joy, and the tenfold yearn- 
ing for glorious life struck down in its prime — 
through all these agonies you fail not, and 
never will fail. But your trial is not in these. 
To be heroic in danger is little ; — you are Eng- 
lishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway i 
of fortune is little; — for do you not love? To* 
be patient through the great chasm and pause 
of loss is little ; for do you not still love in 
heaven? But to be heroic in happiness; to 
bear yourselves gravely and righteously in/ 
the dazzling of the sunshine of morning; not^ 
to forget the God in whom you trust, when He 
gives you most; not to fail those who trust- 
you, when they seem to need you least ; this is : 
the difficult fortitude. It is not in the pining'* 
of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in* 
the wasting of sickness, that your prayer 
should be most passionate, or your guardian- 



163 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

ship most tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, 
for your young soldiers in the bloom of their 
pride ; pray for them, while the only dangers 
round them are in their own wayward wills; 
watch you, and pray, when they have to face, 
not death, but temptation. But it is this for- 
titude also for which there is the crowning 
reward. Believe me, the whole course and 
character of your lovers' lives is in your hands; 
what you would have them be, they shall be, 
if you not only desire to have them so, but 
deserve to have them so; for they are but mir- 
rors in which you will see yourselves imaged. , 
If you are frivolous, they will be so also; if you 
have no understanding of the scope of their 
duty, they also will forget it ; they will listen, 
— they can listen, — to no other interpretation 
of it than that uttered from your lips. Bid 
them be brave; — they will be brave for you; 
bid them be cowards ; and how noble soever 
they be, they will quail for you. Bid them be 
wise, and they will be wise for you ; mock at 
their counsel, and they will be fools for you: 
such and so absolute is your rule over them. 
You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so 
•often, that a wife's rule should only be over 
her husband's house, not over his mind. Ah, 
no! the true rule is just the reverse of that; a 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 169 

true wife, in her husband's house, is his ser- 
vant; it is in his heart that she is queen. 
Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her 
part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, 
it is hers to promise ; all that is dark in him 
she must purge into purity ; all that is failing 
in him she must strengthen into truth : from 
her, through all the world's clamor, he must 
win his praise; in her, through all the world's 
warfare, he must find his peace. 

And, now, but one word more. You may 
wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken all this 
night in praise of war. Yet, truly, if it might 
be, I, for one, would fain join in the cadence 
of hammer-strokes that should beat swords 
into ploughshares: and that this cannot be, is 
not the fault of us men. It is your fault. 
Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by 
your permission, can any contest take place 
among us. And the real, final, reason for all 
the poverty, misery, and rage of battle, 
throughout Europe, is simply that you women, 
however good, however religious, however 
self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are 
too selfish and too thoughtless to take pains 
for any creature out of your own immediate 
circles. You fancy that you are sorry for the 
pain of others. Now I just tell you this, that 

12 Crown 



170 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing 
peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, 
merely broke the china upon your own draw- 
ing-room tables, no war in civilized countries 
would last a week. I tell you more, that at 
whatever moment you chose to put a period to 
war, you could do it with less trouble than you 
take any day to go out to dinner. You know, 
or at least you might know if you would think, 
that every battle you hear of has made many 
widows and orphans. We have, none of us, 
heart enough truly to mourn with these. But 
at least we might put on the outer symbols of 
mourning with them. Let but every Christian 
lady who has conscience toward God, vow 
that she will mourn, at least outwardly, for 
His killed creatures. Your praying is useless, 
and you churchgoing mere mockery of God, 
if you have not plain obedience in you 
enough for this. Let every lady in the upper 
classes of civilized Europe simply vow, that, 
while any cruel war proceeds, she will wear 
black; — a mute's black, — with no jewel, no 
ornament, no excuse for, or evasion into, pret- 
tiness. — I tell you again, no war would last a 
week. 

And lastly. You women of England are all 
now shrieking with one voice. — you and your 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 171 

clergymen together, — because you hear of youf 
Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey 
your Bibles, you will never care who attacks 
them. It is just because you never fulfil a 
single downright precept of the Book, that you 
are so careful for its credit: and just because 
you don't care to obey its whole words, that 
you are so particular about the letters of them. 
The Bible tells you to dress plainly, — and you. 
are mad for finery ; the Bible tells you to have- 
pity on the poor, — and you crush them under 
your carriage- wheels ; the Bible tells you to do 
judgment and justice, — and you do not know„ 
nor care to know, so much as what the Bible 
word 4 'justice" means. Do but learn so much 
of God's truth as that comes to ; know what He 
means when He tells you to be just: and teach 
your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's 
boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, 
unless they are indeed Just men, and Perfect 
in the fear of God ; and you will soon have no 
more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed 
by Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it 
is also written, "In Righteousness He doth 
judge, and make war." 



LECTURE IV. 
THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 



173 



LECTURE IV. 

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 

(Delivered at the R. A. Institution, Woolwick, Decem- 
ber 14, 1869.) 

I would fain have left to the frank expression 
of the moment, but fear I could not have found 
clear words — I cannot easily find them, even 
deliberately, — to tell you how glad I am, and 
yet how ashamed, to accept your permission to 
speak to you. Ashamed of appearing to think 
that I can tell you any truth which you have 
not more deeply felt than I ; but glad in the 
thought that my less experience, and way of 
life sheltered from the trials, and free from the 
responsibilities of yours, many have left me 
with something of a child's power of help to 
you ; a sureness of hope, which may perhaps be 
the one thing that can be helpful to men who 
have done too much not to have often failed in 
doing all that they desired. And indeed, even 
the most hopeful of us cannot but now be in 
many things apprehensive, For this at least 
we all know too well, that we are on the eve of 
a great political crisis, if not of political 

175 



176 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

change. That a struggle is approaching 
between the newly-risen power of democracy 
and the apparently departing power of feudal- 
ism ; and another struggle, no less imminent, 
and far more dangerous, between wealth and 
pauperism. These two quarrels are constantly 
thought of as the same. They are being 
fought together, and an apparently common 
interest unites for the most part the millionaire 
with the noble, in resistance to a multitude, 
crying, part of it for bread and part of it for 
liberty. 

And yet no two quarrels can be more dis- 
tinct. Riches — so far from being necessary to 
noblesse — are adverse to it. So utterly- 
adverse, that the first character of all the 
Nobilities which have founded great dynasties 
in the world is to be poor ; — often poor by oath 
— always poor by generosity. And of every 
true knight in the chivalric ages, the first thing 
history tells you is, that he never kept treasure 
for himself. 

Thus the causes of wealth and noblesse are 
not the same; but opposite. On the other 
hand, the causes of anarchy and of the poor 
are not the same, but opposite. Side by side, 
in the same rank, are now indeed set the pride 
that revolts against authority, and the misery 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 177 

that appeals against avarice. But, so far from 
being a common cause, all anarchy is the fore- 
runner of poverty, and all prosperity begins in 
obedience. So that, thus, it has become 
impossible to give due support to the cause of 
order, without seeming to countenance injury: 
and impossible to plead justly the claims of 
sorrow, without seeming to plead also for those 
of licence. 

Let me try, then, to put in very brief terms 
the real plan of this various quarrel, and the 
truth of the cause on each side. Let us face 
that full truth, whatever it may be, and decide 
what part, according to our power, we should 
take in the quarrel. 

First. For eleven hundred years, all but 
five, since Charlemagne set on his head the 
Lombard crown, the body of European people 
have submitted patiently to be governed gen- 
erally by kings — always by single leaders of 
some kind. But for the last fifty years they 
have begun to suspect, and of late they have 
many of them concluded, that they have been 
on the whole ill- governed, or misgoverned, by 
their kings. Whereupon they say, more and 
more widely, "Let us henceforth have no 
kings ; and no government at all. ' ' 

Now we said, we must face the full truth of 
12 



178 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the matter, in order to see what we are to do. 
And the truth is that the people have been 
misgoverned; — that very little is to be said, 
hitherto, for most of their masters — and that 
certainly in many places they will try their 
new system of "no masters :" — and as that 
arrangement will be delightful to all foolish 
persons, and, at first, profitable to all wicked 
ones, — and as these classes are not wanting or 
unimportant in any human society, — the 
experiment is likely to be tried extensively. 
And the world may be quite content to endure 
much suffering with this fresh hope, and retain 
its faith in anarchy, whatever comes of it, till 
it can endure no more. 

Then, secondly. The people have begun to 
suspect that one particular form of this past 
misgovernment has been, that their masters 
have set them to do all the work, and have 
themselves taken all the wages. In a word, 
that what was called governing them, meant 
only wearing fine clothes, and living on good 
fare at their expense. And I am sorry to say, 
the people are quite right in this opinion also. 
If you inquire into the vital fact of the matter, 
this you will find to be the constant structure 
of European society for the thousand years of 
the feudal system ; it was divided into peasants 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 179 

who lived by working; priests who lived by 
begging ; and knights who lived by pillaging ; 
and as the luminous public mind becomes 
gradually cognizant of these facts, it will 
assuredly not suffer things to be altogether 
arranged that way any more; and the devising 
of other ways will be an agitating business ; 
especially because the first impression of the 
intelligent populace is, that whereas, in the 
dark ages, half the nation lived idle, in the 
bright ages to come, the whole of it may. 

Now, thirdly — and here is much the worst 
phase of the crisis. This past system of mis- 
government, especially during the last three 
hundred years, has prepared, by its neglect, a 
class among the lower orders which it is now 
peculiarly difficult to govern. It deservedly 
lost their respect — but that was the least part 
of mischief. The deadly part of it was, that 
the lower orders lost their habit, and at last 
their faculty of, respect ; —lost the very capa- 
bility of reverence, which is the most precious 
part of the human soul. Exactly in the de- 
gree in which you can find creatures, greater 
than yourself, to look up to, in that degree, 
you are ennobled yourself, and, in that degree, 
happy. If you could live always in the pres- 
ence of archangels, you would be happier than 



180 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

in that of men ; but even if only in the com- 
pany of admirable knights and beautiful ladies, 
the more noble and bright they were, and the 
more you could reverence their virtue, the 
happier you would be. On the contrary, if 
you were condemned to live among a multi- 
tude of idiots, dumb, distorted, and malicious, 
you would not be happy in the constant sense 
of your own superiority. Thus all real joy 
and power of progress in humanity depend on 
finding something to reverence, and all the 
baseness and misery of humanity begin in a 
habit of disdain. Now, by general misgovern- 
ment, I repeat, we have created in Europe a 
vast populace, and out of Europe a still vaster 
one, which has lost even the power and con- 
ception of reverence;* — which exists only in 
the worship of itself — which can neither see 
anything beautiful around it, nor conceive 
anything virtuous above it; which has, 
toward all goodness and greatness, no other 
feelings than those of the lowest creatures — 
fear, hatred, or hunger; a populace which has 
sunk below your appeal in their nature, as it 
has risen beyond your power in their multi- 
tude ; — whom you can now no more charm than 



* Compare Time and Tide, § 169, and Fors Clavigera 
Letter XIV, page 9. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 181 

you can the adder, nor discipline, than you can 
the summer fly. 

It is a crisis, gentlemen ; and time to think 
of it. I have roughly and broadly put it be- 
fore you in its darkness. Let us look what we 
may find of light. 

Only the other day, in a journal which is a 
fairly representative exponent of the Conser- 
vatism of our day, and for the most part not at 
all in favor of strikes or other popular pro- 
ceedings ; only about three weeks since, there 
was a leader, with this, or a similar, title — 
44 What is to become of the House of Lords?* * 
It startled me, for it seemed as if we were 
going even faster than I had thought, when 
such a question was put as a subject of quite 
open debate, in a journal meant chiefly for the 
reading of the middle and upper classes. 
Open or not — the debate is near. What is to 
become of them? And the answer to such 
question depends first on their being able to 
answer another question — "What is the use of 
them?" For some time back, I think the 
theory of the nation has been, that they are 
useful as impediments to business, so as to 
give time for second thoughts. But the na- 
tion is getting impatient of impediments to 
business ; and certainly, sooner or later, will 



182 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

think it needless to maintain these expensive 
obstacles to its humors. And I have not 
heard, either in public, or from any of them- 
selves, a clear expression of their own concep- 
tion of their use. So that it seems thus to be- 
come needful for all men to tell them, as our 
one quite clear-sighted teacher, Carlyle, has 
been telling us for many a year, that the use 
of the Lords of a country is to govern the 
country. If they answer that use, the country 
will rejoice in keeping them ; if not, that will 
become of them which must of all things 
found to have lost their serviceableness. 

Here, therefore, is the one question, at this 
crisis, for them, and for us. Will they be 
lords indeed, and give us laws — dukes indeed, 
and give us guiding — princes indeed, and give 
us beginning, of truer dynasty, which shall not 
be soiled by covetousness, nor disordered by 
iniquity? Have they themselves sunk so far 
as not to hope this? Are there yet any among 
them who can stand forward with open Eng- 
lish, brows, and say, — So far as in me lies, I 
will govern with my might, not for Dieu et 
mon Droit, but for the first grand reading of 
the war cry from which that was corrupted, 
"Dieu et Droit ? Among them I know there 
are some — among you, soldiers of England, I 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 183 

know there are many, who can do this; and in 
you is our trust. I, one of the lower people 
of your country, ask of you in their name, — 
you whom I will not any more call soldiers, 
but by the truer name of Knights; — Equites 
of England, — how many yet of you are there, 
knights errant now beyond all former fields of 
danger — knights patient now beyond all 
former endurance; who still retain the ancient 
and eternal purpose of knighthood, to subdue 
the wicked, and aid the weak? To them, be 
they few or many, we English people call for 
help to the wretchedness, and for rule over the 
baseness, of multitudes desolate and deceived, 
shrieking to one another, this new gospel of 
their new religion. "Let the weak do as they 
can, and the wicked as they will." 

I can hear you saying in your hearts, even 
the bravest of you, "The time is past for all 
that. " Gentlemen, it is not so. The time has 
come for more than all that. Hitherto, sol- 
diers have given their lives for false fame, and 
for cruel power. The day is now when they 
must give their lives for true fame, and for 
beneficent power : and the work is near every 
one of you — close beside you — the means of it 
even thrust into your hands. The people are 
crying to you for command, and you stand there 



184 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

at pause, and silent. You think they don't want 
to be commanded ; try them ; determine what is 
needful for them — honorable for them ; show 
it them, promise to bring them to it, and they 
will follow you through fire. " Govern us, " 
they cry with one heart, though many minds. 
They can be governed still, these English; 
they are men still; nor gnats, nor serpents. 
They love their old ways yet, and their old 
masters, and their old land. They would fain 
live in it, as many as may stay there, if you 
will show them how, there, to live ; — or show 
them even, how, there, like Englishmen, to 
die. 

44 To live in it, as many as may!" How 
many do you think may? How many can? 
How many do you want to live there? As 
masters, your first object must be to increase 
your power ; and in what does the power of a 
country consist? Will you have dominion over 
its stones, or over its clouds, or over its souls? 
What do you mean by a great nation, but a 
great multitude of men who are true to each 
other, and strong, and of worth? Now you 
can increase the multitude only definitely — 
your island has only so much standing room — 
but you can increase the worth indefinitely. 
It is but a little island ; — suppose, little as it is, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 185 

you were to fill it with friends? You may, and 
that easily. You must, and that speedily: or 
there will be an end to this England of ours, 
and to all its loves and enmities. 

To fill this little island with true friends — 
men brave, wise and happy ! Is it so impos- 
sible, think you, after the world's eighteen 
hundred years of Christianity, and our own 
thousand years of toil, to fill only this little 
white gleaming crag with happy creatures, 
helpful to each other? Africa, and India, and 
the Brazilian wide-watered plain, are these not 
wide enough for the ignorance of our race? 
have they not space enough for its pain? 
Must we remain here also savage, — here at 
enmity with each other, — here foodless, house- 
less, in rags, in dust, and without hope, as 
thousands and tens of thousands of us are 
lying? Do not think it, gentlemen. The 
thought that it is inevitable is the last infidel- 
ity ; infidelity not to God only, but to every 
creature and every law that He has made. 
Are we to think that the earth was only shaped 
to be a globe of torture ; and that there cannot 
be one spot of it where peace can rest, or jus- 
tice reign? Where are men ever to be happy, 
if not in England? by whom shall they ever be 
taught to do right, if not by you? Are we not 



186 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

of a race first among the strong ones of the 
earth ; the blood in us incapable of weariness, 
unconquerable by grief? Have we not a his- 
tory of which we can hardly think without be- 
coming insolent in our just pride of it? Can 
we dare, without passing every limit of cour- 
tesy to other nations, to say how much more 
we have to be proud of in our ancestors than 
they? Among our ancient monarchs, great 
crimes stand out as monstrous and strange. 
But their valor, and, according to their under- 
standing, their benevolence, are constant. 
The Wars of the Roses, which are as a fearful 
crimson shadow on our land, represent the 
normal condition of other nations ; while from 
the days of the Heptarchy downward we have 
had examples given us, in all ranks, of the 
most varied and exalted virtue; a heap of 
treasure that no moth can corrupt, and which 
even our traitorship, if we are to become trait- 
ors to it, cannot sully. 

And this is the race, then, that we know not 
any more how to govern ! and this the history 
which we are to behold broken off by sedition ! 
and this is the country, of all others, where 
life is to become difficult to the honest, and 
ridiculous to the wise ! And the catastrophe, 
forsooth, is to come just when we have been 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 187 

making swiftest progress beyond the wisdom 
and wealth of the past. Our cities are a wil- 
derness of spinning wheels instead of palaces ; 
yet the people have not clothes. We have 
blackened every leaf of English greenwood 
with ashes, and the people die of cold; our 
harbors are a forest of merchant ships, and the 
people die of hunger. 

Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours 
only. You alone can feed them, and clothe, 
and bring into their right minds, for you only 
can govern — that is to say, you only, can edu- 
cate them. 

Educate, or govern, they are one and the 
same word. Education does not mean teach- 
ing people to know what they do not know. 
It means teaching them to behave as they do 
not behave. And the true ;< compulsory edu- 
cation" which the people now ask of you is not 
catechism, but drill. It is not teaching the 
youth of England the shapes of letters and the 
tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to 
turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their lit- 
erature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training 
them into the perfect exercise and kingly con- 
tinence of their bodies and souls. It is a pain- 
ful, continual, and difficult work; to be done 
by kindness, by watching, by warning, by pre- 



188 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

cept, and by praise, — but above all — by 
example. 

Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye 
out into the highways and hedges, and compel 
them to come in. " Compulsory! Yes, and 
gratis also. Dei Gratia, they must be taught, 
as, Dei Gratia you are set to teach them. I 
hear strange talk continually, "how difficult it 
is to make people pay for being educated!" 
Why, I should think so ! Do you make your 
children pay for their education, or do you give 
it them compulsorily, and gratis? You do not 
expect them to pay you for their teaching, ex- 
cept by becoming good children. Why should 
you expect a peasant to pay for his, except by 
becoming a good man? — payment enough, I 
think, if we knew it. Payment enough to 
himself, as to us. For that is another of our 
grand popular mistakes — people are always 
thinking of education as a means of livelihood. 
Education is not a profitable business, but a 
costly one ; nay, even the best attainments of 
it are always unprofitable, in any terms of coin. 
No nation ever made its bread either by its 
great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor 
arts or manufactures, by its practical knowl- 
edges, yes : but its noble scholarship, its noble 
philosophy, and its noble art, are always to be 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 189 

bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. 
You do not learn that you may live— you live 
that you may learn. You are to spend on 
National Education, and to be spent for it, and 
to make by it, not more money, but better 
men; — to get into this British Island the 
greatest possible number of good and brave 
Englishmen. They are to be your "money's 
worth. ' ' 

But where is the money to come from? Yes, 
that is to be asked. Let us, as quite the first 
business in this our national crisis, look not 
only into our affairs, but into our accounts, and 
obtain some general notion how we annually 
spend our money, and what we are getting for 
it. Observe, I do not mean to inquire into 
the public revenue only ; of that some account 
is rendered already. But let us do the best we 
can to set down the items of the national pri- 
vate expenditure; and know what we spend 
altogether, and how. 

To begin with this matter of education. 
You probably have nearly all seen the admir- 
able lecture lately given by Captain Maxse, at 
Southampton. Tt contains a clear statement 
of the facts at present ascertained as to our 
expenditure in that respect It appears that of 
our public moneys, for every pound that we 



190 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

spend on education we spend twelve either in 
charity or punishment ; — ten millions a year in 
pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thou- 
sand in instruction. Now Captain Maxse adds 
to this estimate of ten millions public money 
spent on crime and want, a more or less con- 
jectural sum of eight millions for private char- 
ities. My impression is that this is much 
beneath the truth, but at all events it leaves 
out of consideration much the heaviest and 
saddest form of charity — the maintenance, by 
the working members of families, of the unfor- 
tunate or ill-conducted persons whom the gen- 
eral course of misrule now leaves helpless to 
be the burden of the rest. 

Now I want to get first at some, I do not say 
approximate, but at all events some suggestive, 
estimate of the quantity of real distress and 
misguided life in this country. Then next, I 
want some fairly representative estimate of 
our private expenditure in luxuries. We won't 
spend more, publicly, it appears, than eight 
hundred thousand a year, on educating men, 
gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, 
what we spend privately a year, in educating 
horses gratis. Let us, at least, quit ourselves 
in this from the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see 
that for every horse we train also a horseman ; 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 191 

and that the rider be at least as high-bred as 
the horse, not jockey, but chevalier. Again, 
we spend eight hundred thousand, which is 
certainly a great deal of money, in making 
rough minds bright. I want to know how 
much we spend annually in making rough 
stones bright ; that is to say, what may be the 
united annual sum, or near it, of our jewelers' 
bills. So much we pay tor educating children 
gratis; — how much for educating diamonds 
gratis? and which pays best for brightening 
the spirit, or the charcoal? Let us get those 
two items set down with some sincerity, and 
a few more of the same kind. Publicly set 
down. We must not be ashamed of the way 
we spend our money. If our right hand is not 
to know what our left does, it must not be 
because it would be ashamed if it did. 

That is, therefore, quite the first practical 
thing to be done. Let every man who wishes 
well to his country, render it yearly an account 
of his income, and of the main heads of his 
expenditure ; or, if he is ashamed to do so, let 
him no more impute to the poor their poverty 
as a crime, nor set them to break stones in 
order to frighten them from committing it. 
To lose money ill is indeed often a crime ; but 
to get it ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, 



192 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

worst of all. You object, Lords of England, to 
increase, to the poor, the wages you give them, 
because they spend them, you say, unadvis- 
edly. Render them, therefore, an account of 
the wages which they give you; and show 
them, by your example, how to spend theirs, 
to the last farthing, advisedly. 

It is indeed time to make this an acknowl- 
edged subject of instruction, to the working- 
man, — how to spend his wages. For, gentle- 
men, we must give that instruction, whether 
we will or no, one way or the other, We have 
given it in years gone by; and now we find 
fault with our peasantry for having been too 
docile, and profited too shrewdly by our tui- 
tion. Only a few days since I had a letter 
from the wife of a village rector, a man of com- 
mon sense and kindness, who was greatly 
troubled in his mind because it was precisely 
the men who got highest wages in summer 
that came destitute to his door in the winter. 
Destitute, and of riotous temper — for their 
method of spending wages in their period of 
prosperity was by sitting two days a week in 
the tavern parlor, ladling port wine, not out of 
bowls, but out of buckets. Well, gentlemen, 
who taught them that method of festivity? 
Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced 







wmm^ 



m90^ 



' Came destitute to his door in winter. " — Page 192. 

The Crown of Wild Olive. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 193 

freshman, went to my first college supper ; at 
the head of the table sat a nobleman of high 
promise and of admirable powers, since dead 
of palsy ; there also we had in the midst of us, 
not buckets, indeed, but bowls as large as 
buckets ; there also we helped ourselves with 
ladles. There (for this beginning of college 
education was compulsory), I, choosing ladle- 
fuls of punch instead of claret, because I was 
then able, unperceived, to pour them into my 
waistcoat instead of down my throat, stood it 
out to the end, and helped to carry four of my 
fellow students, one of them the son of the 
head of a college, head-foremost downstairs 
and home. 

Such things are no more ; but the fruit of 
them remains, and will for many a day to come. 
The laborers whom you cannot now shut out 
of the ale-house are only the too faithful dis- 
ciples of the gentlemen who were wont to shut 
themselves into the dining-room. The gentle- 
men have not thought it necessary, in order to 
correct their own habits, to diminish their 
incomes; and, believe me, the way to deal 
with your drunken workman is not to lower 
his wages, — but to mend his wits.* 

And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly 

^Compare § 70 of Time and Tide. 
13 Crown 



194 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

how to deal with the sins of our poor brother, 
it is possible that our dimness of sight may 
still have other causes that can be cast out. 
There are two opposite cries of the great Lib- 
eral and Conservative parties, which are both 
most right, and worthy to be rallying cries. 
On their side, lt Let every man have his 
chance ;" on yours, t4 Let every man stand in 
his place. ' ' Yes, indeed, let that be so, every 
man in his place, and every man fit for it. 
See that he holds that place from Heaven's 
Providence; and not from his family's Provi- 
dence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit them- 
selves of simony, we laymen will look after the 
heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal 
quit themselves of nepotism, and we will take 
care of their authority for them. Publish for 
us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which 
the one subject of daily intelligence shall be 
the grounds of promotion; a gazette which 
shall simply tell us, what there certainly can 
be no detriment to the service in our knowing, 
when any officer is appointed to a new com- 
mand, — what his former services and successes 
have been, — whom he has superseded, — and 
on what ground. It will be always a satisfac- 
tion to us ; it may sometimes be an advantage 
to you : and then, when there is really neces- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 195 

sary debate respecting reduction of wages, let 
us always begin not with the wages of the 
industrious classes, but with those of the idle 
ones. Let there be honorary titles, if people 
like them; but let there be no honorary 
incomes. 

So much for the master's motto, " Every 
man in his place." Next for the laborer's 
motto, " Every man his chance." Let us 
mend that for them a little, and say, " Every 
man his certainty" — certainty, that if he does 
well, he will be honored, and aided, and 
advanced in such degree as may be fitting for 
his faculty and consistent with his peace ; and 
equal certainty that if he does ill, he will by 
sure justice be judged, and by sure punishment 
be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if 
that may not be, condemned. That is the 
right reading of the Republican motto, "* Every 
man his chance." And then with such a sys- 
tem of government, pure, watchful, and just, 
you may approach your great problem of 
national education, or, in other words, of 
national employment. For all education 
begins in work. What we think, or what we 
know, or what we believe, is in the end of 
little consequence. The only thing of conse- 
quence is what we do: and for man woman or 



196 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

child, the first point of education is to make 
them do their best. It is the law of good econ- 
omy to make the best of everything. How 
much more to make the best of every creature ! 
Therefore, when your pauper comes to you 
and asks for bread, ask of him instantly — 
What faculty have you? What can you do 
best? Can you drive a nail into wood? Go 
and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a 
brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where 
the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of 
earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all 
over. Can you only drag a weight with your 
shoulders? Stand at the bottom of this hill 
and help up the overladen horses. Can you 
weld iron and chisel stone? Fortify this wreck- 
strewn coast into a harbor; and change these 
shifting sands into fruitful ground. Wherever 
death was, bring life ; that is to be your work ; 
that your parish refuge ; that your education. 
So and no otherwise can we meet existent dis- 
tress. But for the continual education of the 
whole people, and for their future happiness, 
they must have such consistent employment, 
as shall develop all the powers of the fingers, 
and the limbs, and the brain : and that devel- 
opment is only to be obtained by hand-labor, 
of which you have these four great divisions — 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 197 

hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, 
hand-labor in art, hand-labor in war. Of the 
last two of these I cannot speak to-night, and 
of the first two only with extreme brevity. 

I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the 
husbandman and of the shepherd;— to dress 
the earth and to keep the flocks of it — the first 
task of man, and the final one — the education 
always of noblest lawgivers, kings and teach- 
ers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of 
David, of all the true strength of Rome ; and 
all its tenderness : the pride of Cincinnatus and 
the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the 
earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with 
singing: — not steam-piston labor on the earth, 
and the harvest of it brought forth with steam- 
whistling. You will have no prophet's voice 
accompanied by that shepherd's pipe, and pas- 
toral symphony. Do you know that lately, in 
Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of 
England, — in Wordsworth's own home, — a pro- 
cession of villagers on their festa day provided 
for themselves, by way of music, a steam- 
plough whistling at the head of them ! 

Give me patience, while I put the principle 
of machine labor before you, as clearly and in 
as short compass as possible; it is one that 
should be known at this juncture. Suppose a 



198 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

farming proprietor needs to employ a hundred 
men on his estate, and that the labor of these 
hundred men is enough, but not more than 
enough, to till all this land, and to raise from 
it food for his own family, and for the hundred 
laborers. He is obliged, under such circum- 
stances, to maintain all the men in moderate 
comfort, and can only by economy accumulate 
much for himself. But, suppose he contrive a 
machine that will easily do the work of fifty 
men, with only one man to watch it. This 
sounds like a great advance in civilization. 
The farmer of course gets his machine made, 
turns off the fifty men who may starve or emi- 
grate at their choice, and now he can keep half 
of the produce of his estate, which formerly 
went to feed them, all to himself. That is the 
essential and constant operation of machinery 
among us at this moment. 

Nay, it is at first answered ; no man can in 
reality keep half the produce of an estate to 
himself, nor can he in the end keep more than 
his own human share of anything; his riches 
must diffuse themselves at some time; he 
must maintain somebody else with them, how- 
ever he spends them. That is mainly true 
(not altogether so), for food and fuel are in 
ordinary circumstances personally wasted by 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 199 

rich people, in quantities which would save 
many lives. One of my own great luxuries, 
for instance, is candlelight — and I probably 
burn, for myself alone, as many candles dur- 
ing the winter, as would comfort the old eyes, 
or spare the young ones, of a whole rush- 
lighted country village. Still, it is mainly 
true that it is not by their personal waste 
that rich people prevent the lives of the poor. 
This is the way they do it. Let me go back 
to my farmer. He has got his machine made, 
which goes creaking, screaming, and occasion- 
ally exploding, about modern Arcadia. He has 
turned off his fifty men to starve. Now, at 
some distance from his own farm, there is an- 
other on which the laborers were working for 
their bread in the same way, by tilling the 
land. The machinist sends over to these, say- 
ing — "I have got enough food for you without 
your digging or ploughing any more. I can 
maintain you in other occupations instead of 
ploughing that land ; if you rake in its gravel 
you will find some hard stones — you shall 
grind those on mills till they glitter; then, my 
wife shall wear a necklace of them. Also, if 
you turn up the meadows below you will find 
some fine white clay, of which you shall make 
a porcelain service for me : and the rest of the 



200 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

farm I want for pasture for horses for my car- 
riage — and you shall groom them, and some of 
you ride behind the carriage with staves in 
you hands, and I will keep you much fatter 
for doing that than you can keep yourselves 
by digging." 

Well — but it is answered, are we to have no 
diamonds, nor china, nor pictures, nor foot, 
men, then — but all to be farmers? I am not 
saying what we ought to do, I want only to 
show you with perfect clearness first what we 
are doing ; and that, I repeat, is the upshot of 
machine-contriving in this country. And ob- 
serve its effect on the national strength. 
Without machines, you have a hundred and 
fifty yeomen ready to join for defense of the 
land. You ge your machine, starve fifty of 
them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of as 
many more, and for your national defense 
against an enemy, you have now, and can 
have, only fifty men, instead of a hundred and 
fifty ; these also now with minds much alienated 
from you as their chief,* and the rest, lapi- 
daries or footmen ; — and a steam plough. 

That is the one effect of machinery ; but at 
all events, if we have thus lost in men, we 

* [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early 
part of this year, 1873, at the rate of a regiment a week. ] 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 201 

have gained in riches ; instead of happy human 
souls, we have at least got pictures, china, 
horses, and are ourselves better off than we 
were before. But very often, and in much of 
our machine-contriving, even that result does 
not follow. We are not one whit the richer 
for the machine, we only employ it for our 
amusement. For observe, our gaining in 
riches depends on the men who are out of em- 
ployment consenting to be starved, or sent out 
of the country. But suppose they do not con- 
sent passively to be starved, but some of them 
become criminals, and have to be taken charge 
of and fed at a much greater cost than if they 
were at work, and others, paupers, rioters, and 
the like, then you attain the real outcome of 
modern wisdom and ingenuity. You had your 
hundred men honestly at country work ; but 
you don't like the sight of human beings in 
your fields; you like better to see a smoking 
kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that 
pleasure, and you employ your fifty men in 
picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thiev- 
ing. 

By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we 
are to till the ground. By hand-labor also to 
plough the sea; both for food, and in com- 
merce, and in war; not with floating kettles 

14 Crown 



202 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

there neither, but with hempen bridle, and the 
winds of heaven in harness. That is the way 
the power of Greece rose on her Egean, the 
power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfl in 
her blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from 
the North Cape to Sicily : — so, your own domin- 
ion also of the past. Of the past, mind you. 
On the Baltic and the Nile, your power is 
already departed. By machinery you would 
advance to discovery , by machinery you would 
carry your commerce; — you would be engi- 
neers instead of sailors ; and instantly in the 
North seas you are beaten among the ice, and 
before the very Gods of Nile, beaten among 
the sand. Agriculture, then, by the hand or 
by the plough drawn only by animals: and 
shepherd and pastoral husbandry, are to be 
the chief schools of Englishmen. And this 
most royal academy of all academies you have 
to open over all the land, purifying your 
heaths and hills, and waters, and keeping 
them full of every kind of lovely natural 
organism, in tree, herb, and living creature. 
All land that is waste and ugly, you must re- 
deem into ordered fruitfulness; all ruin, deso* 
lateness, imperfectness of hut or habitation, 
you must do away with ; and throughout every 
village and city of your English dominion, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 203 

there must not be a hand that cannot find a 
helper, nor a heart that cannot find a com- 
forter. 

* ' How impossible !" I know you are think- 
ing. Ah ! So far from impossible, it is easy, 
it is natural, it is necessary, and I declare to 
you that, sooner or later, it must be done, at 
our peril. If now our English lords of land 
will fix this idea steadily before them ; take 
the people to their hearts, trust to their loy- 
alty, lead their labor ; — then indeed there will 
be princes again in the midst of us, worthy of 
the island throne, 

"This royal throne of kings— this sceptred isle — 
This fortress built by nature for herself 
Against infection, and the hand of war; 
This precious stone set in the silver sea ; 
This happy breed of men —this little world; 
This other Eden — Demi-Paradise. ' ' 

But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and 
equivocate, clutching through the confused 
catastrophe of all things only at what they can 
still keep stealthily for themselves, — their 
doom is nearer than even their adversaries 
hope, and it will be deeper than even their de- 
spisers dream. 

That, believe me, is the work you have to 
do in England; and out of England you have 



204 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

room for everything else you care to do. Are 
her dominions in the world so narrow that she 
can find no place to spin cotton in but York- 
shire? We may organize emigration into an 
infinite power. * We may assemble troops of 
the more adventurous and ambitious of our 
youth ; we may send them on truest foreign 
service, founding new seats of authority, and 
centers of thought, in uncultivated and uncon- 
quered lands ; retaining the full affection to 
the native country no less in our colonists than 
in our armies, teaching them to maintain alle- 
giance to their fatherland in labor no less than 
in battle ; aiding them with free hand in the 
prosecution of discovery, and the victory over 
adverse natural powers; establishing seats of 
every manufacture in the climates and places 
best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves into 
due allegiance and harmony of skill with the 
dexterities of every race, and the wisdoms of 
every tradition and every tongue. 

And then you may make England itself the 
center of the learning, of the arts, of the cour- 
tesies and felicities of the world. You may 
cover her mountains with pasture ; her plains 
with corn, her valleys with the lily, and her 
gardens with the rose. You may bring to- 
gether there in peace the wise and the pure, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 205 

and the gentle of the earth, and by their word, 
command through its farthest darkness the 
birth of "God's first creature, which was 
Light. ' ' You know whose words those are ; 
the words of the wisest of Englishmen. He, 
and with him the wisest of all other great na- 
tions, have spoken always to men of this hope r 
and they would not hear. Plato, in the dia- 
logue of Critias, his last, broken off at his 
death, —Pindar, in passionate singing of the 
fortunate islands, — Virgil, in the prophetic 
tenth ecologue, — Bacon, in his fable of the New 
Atlantis, — Hore, in the book which, too im- 
patiently wise, became the bye-word of fools — 
these, all, have told us with one voice what we 
should strive to attain ; they not hopeless of 
it, but for our follies forced, as it seems, by 
heaven, to tell us only partly and in parables, 
lest we should hear them and obey. 

Shall we never listen to the words of these 
wisest of men? Then listen at least to the 
words of your children — let us in the lips of 
babes and sucklings find our strength ; and see 
that we do not make them mock instead of 
pray, when we teach them, night and morning, 
to ask for what we believe never can be 



206 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

granted; — that the will of the Father, — which 
is, that His creatures may be righteous and 
happy, — should be done, on earth, as it is in 
Heaven. 



APPENDIX. 



Notes on the Political Economy of Prussia. 

I am often accused of inconsistency; but be- 
lieve myself defensible against the charge with 
respect to what I have said on nearly every 
subject except that of war. It is impossible 
for me to write consistently of war, for the 
groups of facts I have gathered about it lead 
me to two precisely opposite conclusions. 

When I find this the case, in other matters, 
I am silent, till I can choose my conclusions : 
but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, 
by the necessities of time ; and forced to act 
one way or another. The conviction on which 
I act is that it causes an incalculable amount 
of avoidable human suffering, and that it 
ought to cease among Christian nations; and 
if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be 
soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into 
what I conceive to be a better mind. But, on 
the other hand, I know certainly that the most 
beautiful characters yet developed among men 
have been formed in war; — that all great 
nations have been warrior nations, and that the 
only kinds of peace which we are likely to get 
in the present age are ruinous alike to the in- 
tellect, and the heart. 

207 



208 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

The third lecture, in this volume, addressed 
to young soldiers, had for its subject to 
strengthen their trust in the virtue of their 
profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in 
its closing appeal to women, praying them to 
use their influence to bring wars to an end. 
And I have been hindered from completing 
my long intended notes on the economy of the 
Kings of Prussia by continually increasing 
doubt how far the machinery and discipline of 
war, under which they learned the art of gov- 
ernment, was essential for such lesson; and 
what the honesty and sagacity of the Friedrich 
who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia might 
have done for the happiness of his Prussia, 
unruined. 

In war, however, or in peace, the character 
which Carlyle chiefly loves him for, and in 
which Carlyle has shown him to differ from 
all kings up to this time succeeding him, is his 
constant purpose to use every power intrusted 
to him for the good of his people ; he, not in 
name only, but in heart and hand, their king. 

Not in ambition, but in natural instinct of 
duty. Friederich, born to govern, determines 
to govern to the best of his faculty. That 
4 'best" may sometimes be unwise; and self- 
will, or love of glory, may have their oblique 
hold on his mind, and warp it this way or that ; 
but they are never principal with him. He 
believes that war is necessary, and maintains 
it ; sees that peace is necessary, and calmly per- 
sists in the work of it to the day of his death, 
not claiming therein more praise than the head 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 209 

of any ordinary household, who rules it simply 
because it is his place, and he must not yield 
the mastery of it to another. 

How far, in the future, it may be possible 
for men to gain the strength necessary for king- 
ship without either fronting death, or inflicting 
it, seems to me not at present determinable. 
The historical facts are that, broadly speaking, 
none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly 
faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to 
be kings ; and that no other men are so gentle, 
so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth's 
character of the happy warrior cannot be 
reached in the height of it but by a warrior ; 
nay, so much is it beyond common strength 
that I had supposed the entire meaning of it to 
be metaphorical, until one of the best soldiers 
of England himself read me the poem,* and 
taught me what I might have known, had I 
enough watched his own life that it was entirely 
literal. There is nothing of so high reach 
distinctly demonstrable in Friedrich : but I see 
more and more, as I grow older, that the things 
which are the most worth, encumbered among 
the errors and faults of every man's nature, are 
never clearly demonstrable ; and are often most 
forcible when they are scarcely distinct to his 
own conscience, — how much less, clamorous 
for recognition by others ! Nothing can be 
more beautiful than Carlyle's showing of this, 
to any careful reader of Friedrich. But care- 
ful readers are but one in a thousand; and by 



*The late Sir Herbert Edwards. 
14 



210 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the careless, the masses of detail with which 
the historian must deal are insurmountable. 

My own notes, made for the special purpose 
of hunting down the one point of economy, 
though they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own current 
and method of thought, may yet be useful in 
enabling readers, unaccustomed to books in- 
volving so vast a range of conception, to dis- 
cern what, on this one subject only, may be 
gathered from that history. On any other 
subject of importance, similar gatherings 
might be made of other passages. The histor- 
ian has to deal with all at once. 

I therefore have determined to print here, as 
a sequal to the Essay on War, my notes from 
the first volume of Friedrich, on the economies 
of Brandenburg, up to the date of the establish- 
ment of the Prussian monarchy. The econo- 
mies of the first three Kings of Prussia I shall 
then take up in Fors Clavigera, finding them 
fitter for examination in connection with the 
subject of that book than of this. 

I assume, that the reader will take down his 
first volume of Carlyle, and read attentively 
the passages to which I refer him. I give the 
reference first to the largest edition, in six vol- 
umes 1858-1865; then, in parenthesis, to the 
smallest or "people's edition" 1872-1873. The 
pieces which I have quoted in my own text 
are for the use of readers who may not have 
ready access to the book ; and are enough for 
the explanation of the points to which I wish 
them to direct their thoughts in reading such 
histories of soldiers or soldier-kingdoms. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 211 

I. 

Year 928 to 936.— Dawn of Order in Christian Germany. 
Book II. Chap. i. p. 67 (47). 

Henry the Fowler, "the beginning of Ger- 
man kings," is a mighty soldier in the cause of 
peace; his essential work the building and 
organization of fortified towns for the protec- 
tion of men. 

Read page 72 with utmost care (51), "He 
fortified towns" to end of small print. I have 
added some notes on the matter in my lecture 
on Giovanni Pisano; but whether you can 
glance at them or not, fix in your mind this 
institution of truly civil or civic building in 
Germany, as distinct from the building of 
baronial castles for the security of the robbers ! 
and of a standing army consisting of every 
ninth man, called a "burgher" ("townsman") 
■ — a soldier appointed to learn that profession 
that he may guard the walls — the exact re- 
verse of our notion of a burgher. 

Frederick's final idea of his army is, indeed, 
only this. 

Brannibor, a chief fortress of the Wends, is 
thus taken, and further strengthened by Henry 
the Fowler; wardens appointed for it; and 
thus the history of Brandenburg begins. On 
all frontiers, also, this "beginning of German 
kings" has his "Markgraf," "Ancient of the 
marked place." Read page 73, measuredly, 
learning it by heart, if it may be. (51-2). 



312 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

II. 
936 — 1000. — History of Nascent Brandenburg. 

The passage I last desired you to read ends 
with this sentence: "The sea-wall you build, 
and what main floodgates you establish in it, 
will depend on the state of the outer sea. ' ' 

From this time forward you have to keep 
clearly separate in your minds, (a) the history 
of that outer sea, Pagan Scandinavia, Russia, 
and Bor- Russia, or Prussia proper; (b) the 
history of Henry the Fowler's Eastern and 
Western Marches; asserting themselves grad- 
ually as Austria and the Netherlands; and (c) 
the history of this inconsiderable fortress of 
Brandenburg, gradually becoming consider- 
able, and the capital city of increasing district 
between them. That last history, however, 
Carlyle is obliged to leave vague and gray for 
two hundred years after Henry's death. Ab- 
solutely dim for the first century, in which 
nothing is evident but that its wardens or 
Markgraves had no peaceable possession of the 
place. Read the second paragraph in page 
74 (52-3), "in old books" to ' 'reader, " and the 
first in page 83 (59), " meanwhile' ' to "sub- 
stantial. ' ' consecutively. They bring the story 
of Brandenburg itself down, at any rate, from 
936 to 1000. 

III. 
936 — 1000. — State of the Outer Sea. 

Read now chapter II. beginning at page 76 
(54), wherein you will get account of the begin- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 213 

tiing of vigorous missionary work on the outer 
sea, in Prussia proper; of the death of St. 
Adalbert, and of the purchase of his dead body 
by the Duke of Poland. 

You will not easily understand Carlyle's 
laugh in this chapter, unless you have learned 
yourself to laugh in sadness, and to laugh in 
love. 

"No Czech blows his pipe in the woodlands 
without certain precautions and preliminary 
fuglings of a devotional nature." (Imagine 
St. Adalbert, in spirit, at the railway station 
in Birmingham!) 

My own main point for notice in the chapter 
is the purchase of his body for its "weight in 
gold." Swindling angels held it up in the 
scales; it did not weigh so much as a web of 
gossamer. "Had such excellent odor, too, and 
came for a mere nothing of gold, " says Car- 
lyle. It is one of the first commercial transac- 
tions of Germany, but I regret the conduct of 
the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism has 
been proud of ceasing to invest in relics, its 
swindling angels helping it to better things, 
as it supposes. For my own part, I believe 
Christian Germany could not have bought at 
this time any treasure more precious; neverthe- 
less, the missionary work itself you find is 
wholly vain. The difference of opinion be- 
tween St. Adalbert and the Wends, on Divine 
matters, does not signify to the Fates. They 
will not have it disputed about; and end the 
dispute adversely, to St. Adalbert, — adversely, 



214 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

even, to Brandenburg and its civilizing power, 
as you will immediately see. 

IV. 
iooo — 1030. — History of Brandenburg in Trouble. 
Book II. Chap. iii. p. 83 (59)* 

The adventures of Brandenburg in contest 
with Pagan Prussia, irritated, rather than 
amended, by St. Adalbert. In 1023, roughly, 
a hundred years after Henry the Fowler's 
death, Brandenburg is taken by the Wends, 
and its first line of Markgraves ended; its 
population mostly butchered, especially the 
priests; and the Wends* God, Triglaph, " some- 
thing like three whales' cubs combined by 
boiling," set up on the top of St. Mary's Hill. 

Here is an adverse " Doctrine of the Trinity" 
which has its supporters! It is wonderful, — 
this Tripod and Triglyph, — three footed, three 
cut faith of the North and South, the leaf of 
the oxalis, and strawberry, and clover, foster- 
ing the same in their simple manner. I sup- 
pose it to be the most savage and natural of 
notions about Deity ; a prismatic idol-shape of 
Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil 
grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held 
his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," 
says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled, — 
shadowy Markgraves the like — church and 
state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, like a triple 
porpoise under the influence of laudanum, 
stood, I know not whether on his head or his 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 215 

tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as the Su- 
preme of this Universe for the time being." 



1030 — 1 130. — Brandenburg under the Ditmarsch Mark- 
graves, or Ditrnarsch-Stade Markgraves. 

Book II. Chap. iii. p. 85 (60). 

Of Anglish, or Saxon breed. They attack 
Brandenburg, under its Triglyphic protector, 
take it — dethrone him, and hold the town for 
a hundred years, their history " stamped ben- 
eficially on the face of things, Markgraf after 
Markgraf getting killed in the business. 
'Erschlagen,' 4 slain, ' fighting with the Heathen 
— say the old books, and pass on to another. " 
If we allow seven years to Triglaph —we get a 
clear century for these — as above indicated. 
They die out in 11 30. 

VI. 

1 130 — 1 1 70. — Brandenburg under Albert the Bear. 
Book II. Chap. iv. p. 91 (64). 

He is the first of the Ascenian Markgraves, 
whose castles of Ascanica is on the northern 
slope of the Hartz Mountains, " ruins still 
dimly traceable." 

There had been no soldier or king of note 
among the Ditmarsch Markgraves, so that you 
will do well to fix in your mind successively 
the three men, Henry the Fowler, St. Adal- 
bert, and Albert the Bear. A soldier again, 



216 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

and a strong one. Named the Bear only from 
the device on his shield, first wholly definite 
Markgraf of Brandenburg that there is, "and 
that the luckiest of events for Brandenburg. " 
Read page 93 (66) carefully, and note this of 
his economies. 

4 'Nothing better is known to me of Albert 
the Bear than his introducing large numbers 
of Dutch Netherlanders into those countries ; 
-men thrown out of work, who already knew 
how to deal with bog and sand, by mixing 
and delving, and who first taught Brandenburg 
what greenness and cow-pasture was. The 
Wends, in presence of such things, could not 
but consent more and more to efface them- 
selves — either to become German, and grow 
milk and cheese in the Dutch manner, or to 
disappear from the world. 

44 After two hundred and fifty years of bark- 
ing and worrying, the Wends are now finally 
reduced to silence ; their anarchy well buried 
and wholesome Dutch cabbage planted over 
it; Albert did several great things in the 
world; but this, for posterity, remains his 
memorable feat. Not done quite easily, but 
done : big destinies of nations or of persons are 
not founded gratis in this world. He had a 
sore, toilsome time of it, coercing, warring, 
managing among his fellow-creatures, while 
his day's work lasted — fifty years or so, for it 
began early. He died in his Castle of Ballen- 
stadt, peaceably among the Hartz Mountains 
at last, in the year 1170, age about sixty-five/' 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 217 

Now, note in all this the steady gain of 
soldiership enforcing order and agriculture, 
with St. Adalbert giving higher strain to the 
imagination. Henry the Fowler establishes 
walled towns, fighting for mere peace. Albert 
the Bear plants the country with cabbages, 
fighting for his cabbage-fields. And the dis- 
ciples of St. Adalbert, generally, have suc- 
ceeded in substituting some idea of Christ for 
the idea of Triglaph. Some idea only ; other 
ideas than of Christ haunt even to this day 
those Hartz Mountains among which Albert 
the Bear died so peacefully. Mephistopheles, 
and all his ministers, inhabit there, command- 
ing mephitic clouds and earth-born dreams. 

VII. 

1170 — 1320. — Brandenburg 150 years under the Ascanien 

Markgraves. 

Vol. I. Book II. Chap. viii. p. 135 (96). 

44 Wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to 
be more and more planted by them in the 
waste sand: intrusive chaos, and Triglaph 
held at bay by them," till at last in 1240, 
seventy years after the great Bear's death, 
they fortify a new Bourg, a 44 little rampart/' 
Wehrlin, diminutive of Wehr (or vallum), 
gradually smoothing itself, with a little echo 
of the Bear in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily 
river Spree flowing by, 44 in which you catch 
various fish;" while tracfe over the flats and 
by the dull streams, is widely possible. Of 
the Ascanien race, the notablest is Otto with 



218 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the Arrow, whose story see, pp. 1 38-141 
(98-109), noting that Otto is one of the first 
Minnesingers; that, being a prisoner to the 
Archbishop of Magdeburg, his wife rescues 
him, selling her jewels to bribe the canons; 
and that the Knight, set free on parole and 
promise of further ransom, rides back with his 
own price in his hand ; holding himself thereat 
cheaply bought, though no angelic legerdemain 
happens to the scales now. His own estimate 
of his price — "Rain gold ducats on my war- 
horse and me, till you cannot see the point of 
my spear atop. ' ■ 

Emptiness of utter pride, you think? 

Not so. Consider yourself, reader, how 
much you dare to say, aloud, you are worth. 
If you have no courage to name any price 
whatsoever for yourself, believe me, the cause 
is not your modesty, but that in ve^ truth 
you feel in your heart there would be no bid 
for you at Lucien's sale of lives, were that 
again possible, at Christie and Manson's. 

Finally (13 19 exactly; say 1320, for memory), 
the Ascanien line expired in Brandenburg, and 
the little town and its electorate lapsed to the 
Kaiser: meantime other economical arrange- 
ments had been in progress ; but observe first 
how far we have got. 

The Fowler, St. Adalbert, and the Bear have 
established order, and some sort of Christi- 
anity; but the established persons begin to 
think somewhat too well of themselves. On 
quite honest terms, a dead saint or a living 
knight ought to be worth their true "weight in 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 219 

gold." But a pyramid, with only the point of 
the spear seen at top, would be many times 
over one's weight in gold. And although men 
were yet far enough from the notion of modern 
days, that the gold is better than the flesh, 
and from buying it with the clay of one's body, 
and even the fire of one's soul, instead of soul 
and body with it, they were beginning to fight 
for their own supremacy, or for their own 
religious fancies, and not at all to any useful 
end, until an entirely unexpected movement is 
made in the old useful direction forsooth, only 
by some kind ship-captains of Lubeck! 

VIII. 

1210 — 1320. — Civil work, aiding military, during the 

Ascanien period. 

Vol. I. Book II. Chap. vi. p. 109 (77). 

In the year 1 190, Acre not yet taken, and 
the crusading army wasting by murrain on the 
shore, the German soldiers especially having 
none to look after them, certain compassionate 
ship-captains of Lubeck, one Walpot von Bas- 
senheim taking the lead, formed themselves 
into an union for succor of the sick and the 
dying, set up canvas tents from the Lubeck 
ship stores, and did what utmost was in them 
silently in the name of mercy and heaven. 
Finding its work prosper, the little medicinal 
and weather-fending company took vows on 
itself, strict chivalry forms, and decided to 
become permanent " Knights Hospitallers of 
our dear Lady of Mount Zion," separate from 



220 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the former Knights Hospitallers, as being 
entirely German: yet soon, as the German 
Order of St. Mary, eclipsing in importance 
Templars, Hospitallers, and every other chiv- 
alric order then extant; no purpose of battle 
in them, but much strength for it; their pur- 
pose only the helping of German pilgrims. To 
this only they are bound by their vow, "gel- 
bude, " and become one of the usefullest of 
clubs in all the Pall Mall of Europe. 

Finding pilgrimage in Palestine falling slack, 
and more need for them on the homeward 
side of the sea, their Hochmeister, Hermann 
of the Salza. goes over to Venice in 1210. 
There, the titular bishop of still unconverted 
Preussen advises him of that field of work for 
his idle knights. Hermann thinks well of it: 
sets his St. Mary's riders at Triglaph, with 
the sword in one hand and a missal in the 
other. 

Not your modern way of effecting conver- 
sion! Too illiberal, you think; and what 
would Mr. J. S. Mill say? 

But if Triglaph had been verily "three 
whales' cubs combined by boiling," you would 
yourself have promoted attack on him for the 
sake of his oil, would not you? The Teutsch 
Ritters, fighting him for charity, are they so 
much inferior to you? 

"They built, and burnt, innumerable stock- 
ade for and against ; built wooden forts which 
are now stone towns. They fought much and 
prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, 
ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times, 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 221 

they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel with 
dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might 
become grassy meadow — as it continues to this 
day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its 
grand stone Schloss still visible and even hab- 
itable : this was at length their headquarters. 
But how many Burgs of wood and stone they 
built, in different parts; what revolts, sur- 
prisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places 
they had no man has counted. 

" But always some preaching by zealous 
monks, accompanied the chivalrous fighting. 
And colonists came in from Germany ; trick- 
ling in, or at times streaming. Victorious 
Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten heathen : 
terms not of tolerant nature, but which will be 
punctually kept by Ritterdom. When the 
flame of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up 
again too extensively, high personages came 
on crusade to them. Ottocar, King of Bo- 
hemia, with his extensive far-shining chivalry, 
'conquered Samland in a month;' tore up the 
Romove where Adalbert had been massacred, 
and burnt it from the face of the earth. A 
certain fortress was founded at that time, in 
Ottocar's presence; and in honor of him they 
named it King's Fortress, 4 Konigsberg. ' 
Among King Ottocar's esquires, or subaltern 
junior officials, on this occasion, is one Rudolf, 
heir of a poor Swiss lordship and gray hill 
castle, called Hapsburg, rather in reduced 
circumstances, whom Ottocar likes for his pru- 
dent, hardy ways; a stout, modest, wise young 



222 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

man, who may chance to redeem Hapsburg a 
little, if he lives. 

4 'Conversion, and complete conquest once 
come, there was a happy time for Prussia; 
ploughshare instead of sword: busy sea-havens, 
German towns, getting built ; churches every- 
where rising; grass growing, and peaceable 
cows, where formerly had beeen quagmire and 
snakes, and for the Order a happy time. On 
the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the 
first century and more, was a grand phenom- 
enon, and flamed like a bright blessed beacon 
through the night of things, in those Northern 
countries. For above a century, we perceive, 
it was the rallying place of all brave men who 
had a career to seek on terms other than vul- 
gar. The noble soul, aiming beyond money, 
and sensible to more than hunger in this 
world, had a beacon burning (as we say), if the 
night chanced to overtake it, and the earth to 
grow too intricate, as is not uncommon. Bet- 
ter than the career of stump-oratory, I should 
fancy, and its Hesperides apples, golden, and 
of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling 
away one's poor spiritual gift of God (loan, not 
gift), such as it may be, in building the lofty 
rhyme, the lofty review article, for a discern- 
ing public that has sixpence to spare! Times 
alter greatly. "* 

We must pause here again for a moment to 



*I would much rather print these passages of Carlyle 
in large golden letters than small black ones ; but they 
are only here at all for unlucky people who can't read 
them with the context. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 223 

think where we are, and who is with us. The 
Teutsch Ritters have been fighting, indepen- 
dently of all states, for their own hand, or St. 
Adalbert's; — partly for mere love of fight, 
partly for love of order, partly for love of God. 
Meantime, other Riders have been fighting 
wholly for what they could get by it ; and other 
persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at 
all, but in their own towns peacefully manu- 
facturing and selling. 

Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has 
become a military power, Flanders a mercan- 
tile one, pious only in the degree consistent 
with their several occupations. Prussia is 
now a practical and farming country, more 
Christian than its longer-converted neighbors. 

"Towns are built, Konigsberg (King Otto- 
car's town), Thoren (Thorn, City of the Gates), 
with many others; so that the wild population 
and the tame now lived tolerably together, 
under Gospel and Lubeck law; and all was 
ploughing and trading. ' ' 

But Brandenburg itself, what of it? 

The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the 
whole prosperously down to 1320, when their 
line expires, and it falls into the power of 
Imperial Austria. 

IX. 

1320 — 14 15— Brandenburg under the Austrians. 

A century — the fourteenth — of miserable 
anarchy and decline for Brandenburg, its 



224 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Kurfursts, in deadly succession, making what 
they can out of it for their own pockets. The 
city itself and its territory utterly helpless. 
Read pp. 181 (129, 130). " The towns suffered 
much, and trade they might have had going to 
wreck. Robber castles flourished, all else 
decayed, no higway safe. What are Hamburg 
peddlers made for but to be robbed?" 

X. 

141 5 — 1440. — Brandenburg under Friedrich of Nurem- 
berg. 

This is the fourth of the men whom you are 
to remember as creators of the Prussian mon- 
archy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert 
the Bear, of Ascanien, and Friedrich of Nur- 
emberg; (of Hohenzollern by name, and by 
country of the Black Forest, north of the Lake 
of Constance). 

Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, dur- 
ing the great Council, for about 5^200,000 of 
our money, worth perhaps a million in that 
day; still, with its capabilities, "dog cheap." 
Admitting, what no one at the time denied, 
the general marketableness of states as private 
property, this is the one practical result, thinks 
Carlyle (not likely to think wrong), of that 
oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of 
the 4< elixir of the intellect and dignity of 
Europe. And that one thing was not its 
doing; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated," 
putting, however, at last, Brandenburg again 
under the will of one strong man. On St. 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 225 

John's Day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, 
44 and Brandenburg, under its wise Kurfurst, 
begins to be cosmic again." The story of 
Heavy Peg, pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of 
the most brilliant and important passages of 
the first volume; page 199, specially to our 
purpose, must be given entire : — 

14 The offer to be Kaiser was made him in 
his old days; but he wisely declined that too. 
It was in Brandenburg, by what he silently 
founded there, that he did his chief benefit to 
Germany and mankind. He understood the 
noble art of governing men ; had in him the 
justness, clearness, valor, and patience needed 
for that. A man of sterling probity, for one 
thing. Which indeed is the first requisite in 
said art : — if you will have your laws obeyed 
without mutiny, see well that they be pieces of 
God Almighty's law ; otherwise all the artillery 
in the world would not keep down mutiny. 

44 Friedrich 'traveled much over Braden- 
burg ;' looking into everything with his own 
eyes; making, I can well fancy, innumerable 
crooked things straight; reducing more and 
more that famishing dog-kennel of a Branden- 
burg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits 
represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid 
gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in 
the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hus- 
site wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, 
in which no man could prosper, he may be de- 
fined as constantly prosperous. To Branden- 
burg he was, very literally, the blessing of 

15 Crown 



226 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

blessings ; redemption out of death into life. 
In the ruins of that old Friesack Castle, bat- 
tered down by Heavy Peg, antiquarian science 
(if it had any eyes) might look for the tap- 
root of the Prussian nation, and the beginning 
of all that Brandenburg has since grown to 
under the sun. ■ ' 

Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its 
various budding and withering, under the 
succession of the twelve Electors, of whom 
Priedrich, with his Heavy Peg is first, and 
Friedrich, first King of Prussia, grandfather 
of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth. 

XI. 

141 5 — 1 701. — Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern Kur- 

fursts. 

Book III. 

Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they 
came to power in Nuremberg, is told in Chap. 
v. of Book II. 

Their succession in Brandenburg is given in 
brief at page 377 (269). I copy it, in absolute 
barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary 
convenience, here : — 

Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of 

Nuremberg) 141 2-1440 

Friedrich II., called "Iron Teeth". .1440-1472 

Albert 1472-1486 

Johann 1486-1499 

Joachim I 1499-1535 

Joachim II 1535-1571 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 227 

Johann George 1571-1598 

Joachim Friedrich 1598-1608 

Johann Sigismtmd 1608-1619 

George Wilhelm 1619-1640 

Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector) 1640-1688 
Friedrich, first King; crowned 18th 

January f 1701 

Of this line of Princes we have to say they 
followed generally in their ancestor's steps, and 
had success of the like kind more or less; 
Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and 
behavior as well as by descent. No lack of 
quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There 
was likewise solid fair play in general, no 
founding of yourself on ground that will not 
carry, and there was instant, gentle, but inex- 
orable crushing of mutiny, if it showed itself, 
which, after the Second Elector, or at most 
the Third, it had altogether ceased to do. 

This is the general account of them; of 
special matters note the following : — 

II. Friedrich, called "Iron Teeth," from his 
firmness, proves a notable manager and gov- 
ernor. Builds the palace at Berlin in its first 
form, and makes it his chief residence. Buys 
Neumark from the fallen Teutsch Ritters, 
and generally establishes things on securer 
footing. 

III. Albert, "a fiery, tough old gentleman," 
called the Achilles of Germany in his day; 
has half-a-century of fighting with his own 
Nurembergers, with Bavaria, France, Bur- 



228 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

gundy and its fiery Charles, besides being head 
constable to the Kaiser among any disorderly 
persons in the East. His skull, long shown on 
his tomb, * 'marvelous for strength and with 
no visible sutures. " 

IV. John, the orator of his race ; (but the 
orations unrecorded). His second son, Arch- 
bishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memor- 
able work see page 223 (143), and read in con- 
nection with that the history of Markgraf 
George, pp. 237-241 (152-154), and the 8th 
chapter of the third book. 

V. Joachim, of little note ; thinks there has 
been enough Reformation, and checks pro- 
ceedings in a dull stubbornness, causing him 
at least grave domestic difficulties. — Page 271 

(i73). 

VI. Joachim II. Again active in the 
Reformation, and staunch, 

"though generally in a cautious, weighty never 
in a rash, swift way, to the great cause of 
Protestantism and to all good causes. He was 
himself a solemly devout man; deep, awe- 
stricken reverence dwelling in his view of this 
universe. Most serious, though with a jocose 
dialect, commonly having a cheerful wit in 
speaking to men. Luther's books he called 
his Seelenschatz (soul's treasures) ; Luther and 
the Bible were his chief reading. Fond of 
profane learning, too, and of the useful or 
ornamental arts; given to music, and 'would 
himself sing aloud* when he had a melodious 
leisure hour." 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 229 

VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr ; 
no mistresses, no luxuries allowed ; at the sight 
of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on 
an unhappy youth and pack him from his pres- 
ence. Very strict in point of justice ; a peasant 
once appealing to him in one of his inspection 
journeys through the country — 

11 'Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so 
and so; I am your Highness's born subject.' — 
4 Thou shouldst have it, man, wert thou a born 
Turk!' answered Johann George. " 

Thus, generally, we find this line of Elec- 
tors representing in Europe the Puritan mind 
of England in a somewhat duller, but less 
dangerous, form ; receiving what Protestantism 
could teach of honesty and common sense, but 
not its an ti- Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual 
anxiety. Pardon of sins is not to be had from 
Tetzel ; neither, the Hohenzollern mind advises 
with itself, from even Tetzel' s master, for 
either the buying or the asking. On the 
whole, we had better commit as few as pos- 
sible, and live just lives and plain ones. 

"A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest sol- 
idity, looks through the conduct of this Herr; 
a determined Protestant he too, as indeed all 
the following were and are. ' ' 

VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of 
Prussia, which hitherto, you observe, has 
always been spoken of as a separate country 
from Brandenburg. March n, 1605 — 
"Squeezed his way into the actual guardian- 

16 



230 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

ship of Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which 
was his by right. ' ' 

For my own part, I do not trouble myself 
much about these rights, never being able to 
make out any single one, to begin with, except 
the right to keep everything and every place 
about you in as good order as you can — Prussia, 
Poland, or what else. I should much like, for 
instance, just now, to hear of any honest 
Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed tak- 
ing a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what 
he could make of his rights as far round Gib- 
raltar as he could enforce them. At all 
events, Master Joachim has somehow got hold 
of Prussia ; and means to keep it. 

IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for 
our economical purposes, as getting the 
44 guardianship* ' of Prussia confirmed to him. 
The story at page 317 (226), "a strong flame 
of choler," indicates a new order of things 
among the knights of Europe — * 'princely eti- 
quettes melting all into smoke. ' ' Too literally 
so, that being one of the calamitous functions 
of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy 
life our country is living. In the Duchy of 
Cleve, especially, concerning which legal dis- 
pute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is 
well worth the lawyers' trouble, it seems. 

"It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires 
in extent. A naturally opulent country of fer- 
tile meadows, shipping capabilities, metallifer- 
ous hills, and at this time, in consequence of 
the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 231 

Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with 
ingenious industries, and rising to be what it 
still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A 
country lowing with kine ; the hum of the flax- 
spindle heard in its cottages in those old days 
— 'much of the linen called Hollands is made in 
Julich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold 
by the Dutch. ' says Busching. A coutitry in 
our days which is shrouded at short intervals 
with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud 
with sounds of the anvil and the loom." 

The lawyers took two hundred and six years 
to settle the question concerning this Duchy, 
and the thing Johann Sigismund had claimed 
legally in 1609 was actually handed over to 
Johann Sigismund's descendants in the seventh 
generation. " These litigated duchies are now 
the Prussian provinces, Julich, Berg, Cleve, 
and the nucleus of Prussia's possessions in the 
Rhine country. ' ' 

X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327 
(23 1 ) 333) on this Eelector and German Pro- 
testantism, now fallen old, and somewhat too 
little dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the 
only weak prince of all the twelve. For 
another example how the heart and life of a 
country depend upon its prince, not on its 
council, read this, Gustavus Adolphus, demand- 
ing the cession of Spandau and Kustrin : 

"Which cession Kurfurst George Wilhelm, 
though giving all his prayers to the good cause, 
could by no means grant. Gustav had to 



232 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

insist, with more and more emphasis, advanc- 
ing at last with military menace upon Berlin 
itself. He was met by George Wilhelm and 
his Council, 'in the woods of Copenick,' a short 
way to the east of that city ; there George Wil- 
helm and his Council wandered about, sending 
messages, hopelessly consulting, saying among 
each other, 'Que faire? ils ont des canons.' 
For many hours so, round the inflexible Gus- 
tav, who was there like a fixed milestone, and 
to all questions and comers had only one 
answer. ' ' 

On our special question of war and its conse- 
quences, read this of the Thirty Years' one: 

"But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, 
and towards the latter times the exclusive one, 
was hunger. The opposing armies tried to 
starve one another; at lowest, tried each not to 
starve. Each trying to eat the country or, at 
any rate, to leave nothing eatable in it ; what 
that will mean for the country we may con- 
sider. As the armies too frequently, and the 
Kaiser's armies habitually, lived without com- 
missariat, often enough without pay, all hor- 
rors of war and of being a seat of war, that 
have been since heard of, are poor to those then 
practiced, the detail of which is still horrible 
to read. Germany, in all eatable quarters of 
it, had to undergo the process; tortured, torn 
to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in mortar, 
under the iron mace of war. Brandenburg 
saw its towns seized and sacked, its coun- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 233 

try populations driven to despair by the one 
party and the other. Three times — first in the 
Wallenstein- Mecklenburg times, while fire and 
sword were the weapons, and again, twice over, 
in the ultimate stages of the struggle, when 
starvation had become the method — Branden- 
burg fell to be the principal theater of conflict, 
where all forms of the dismal were at their 
height. In 1638, three years after that preci- 
ous 'Peace of Prag, ' . . . the ravages of the 
starving Gallas and his Imperialists excelled 
all precedent, . . . men ate human flesh, nay, 
human creatures ate their own children. ' ' Que 
faire? ils ont des canons!' M 

"We have now arrived at the lowest nadir 
point' ' (says Carlyle) "of the history of Bran- 
denburg under the Hohenzollerns. " Is this 
then all that Heavy Peg and our nine Kurfursts 
have done for us? 

Carlyle does not mean that: but even he, 
greatest of historians since Tacitus, is not 
enough careful to mark for us the growth of 
national character, as distinct from the pros- 
perity of dynasties. 

A republican historian would think of this 
development only, and suppose it to be pos- 
sible without any dynasties. 

Which is indeed in a measure so, and the 
work now chiefly needed in moral philosophy, 
as well as history, is an analysis of the con- 
stant and prevalent, yet unthought of, influ- 
ences, which, without any external help from 
kings, and in a silent and entirely necessary 
manner, form, in Sweden, in Bavaria, in the 



231 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Tyrol, in the Scottish border, and on the 
French seacoast, races of noble peasants ; paci- 
fic, poetic, heroic, Christian-hearted in the 
deepest sense, who may indeed perish by sword 
or famine in any cruel thirty years' war, or 
ignoble thirty years' peace, and yet leave such 
strength to their children that the country, 
apparently ravaged into hopeless ruin, re- 
vives, under any prudent king, as the culti- 
vated fields do under the spring rain. How 
the rock to which no seed can cling, and which 
no rain can soften, is subdued into the good 
ground which can bring forth its hundredfold, 
we forget to watch, while we follow the foot- 
steps of the sower, or mourn the catastrophe 
of the storm. All this while, the Prussian 
earth, — the Prussian soul, — has been thus 
dealt upon by successive fate; and now, 
though laid, as it seems, utterly desolate, it 
can be revived by a few years of wisdom and 
of peace. 

Vol. I. Book III. Chap, xviii.— The Great 
Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm. Eleventh of the 
dynasty : — 

4 'There hardly ever came to sovereign power 
a young man of twenty under more distress- 
ing, hopeless-looking circumstances. Political 
significance Brandenburg had none; a mere 
Protestant appendage, dragged about by a 
Papist Kaiser, his father's Prime Minister, as 
we have seen, was in the interest of his ene- 
mies; not Brandenburg's servant, but 
Austria's. The very commandants of his fort- 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 235 

resses, Commandant of Spandau more espe- 
cially, refused to obey Friedrich Wilhelm on 
his accession; 'were bound to obey the Kaiser 
in the first place. ' 

44 For twenty years past Brandenburg had 
been scoured by hostile armies, which, espe- 
cially the Kaiser's part of which, committed 
outrages new in human history. In a year or 
two hence, Brandenburg became again the 
theater of business. Austrian Gallas advanc- 
ing thither again (1644) with intent 4 to shut up 
Torstenson and his Swedes in Jutland. ' Gal- 
las could by no means do what he intended; 
on the contrary, he had to run from Torsten- 
son— what feet could do; was hunted, he and 
his Merode Bruder (beautiful inventors of the 
'marauding* art), till they pretty much all 
died (crepirten), says Kohler. No great loss 
to society, the death of these artists, but we 
can fancy what their life, and especially what 
the process of their dying, may have cost poor 
Brandenburg again! 

44 Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in this as in 
other emergencies, was sun-clear to himself, 
but for most part dim to everybody else. He 
had to walk very warily, Sweden on one hand 
of him, suspicious Kaiser on the other: he 
had to wear semblances, to be ready with eva- 
sive words, and advance noiselessly by many 
circuits. More delicate operation could not 
be imagined. But advance he did; advance 
and arrive. With extraordinary talent, dili- 
gence, and felicity the young man wound him- 
self out of this first fatal position, got those 



236 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

foreign armies pushed out of his country, and 
kept them out. His first concern had been 
to find some vestige of revenue, to put that 
upon a clear footing, and by loans or other- 
wise to scrape a little ready-money together. 
On the strength of which a small body of sol- 
diers could be collected about him, and drilled 
into real ability to fight and obey. This as a 
basis: on this followed all manner of things, 
freedom from Swedish-Austrian invasions, as 
the first thing. He was himself, as appeared 
by-and-by, a fighter of the first quality, when 
it came to that ; but never was willing to fight 
if he could help it. Preferred rather to shift, 
manoeuvre, and negotiate, which he did in 
most vigilant, adroit, and masterly manner. 
But by degrees he had grown to have, and 
could maintain it, an army of 24,000 men, 
among the best troops then in being. ' ' 

To wear semblances, to be ready with eva- 
sive words, how is this, Mr. Carlyle? thinks 
perhaps, the rightly thoughtful reader. 

Yes, such things have to be. There are lies 
and lies, and there are truths and truths. 
Ulysses cannot ride on the ram's back, like 
Phryxus; but must ride under his belly. 
Read also this, presently following : 

4 'Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm 
who had shone much in the battle of Warsaw, 
into which he was dragged against his will, 
changed sides. An inconsistent, treacherous 
man? Perhaps not, O reader! perhaps a man 



THE CROWN OF AVILD OLIVE. 237 

advancing 'in circuits,' the only way he has ; 
spirally, face now east, now west, with his own 
reasonable private aim sun-clear to him all 
the while?" 

The battle of Warsaw, three days long, 
fought with Gustavus, the grandfather of 
Charles XII., against the Poles, virtually 
ends the Polish power : 

"Old Johann Casimir, not long after that 
peace of Olivia, getting tired of his unruly 
Polish chivalry and their ways, abdicated — re- 
tired to Paris, and 'lived much with Ninon de 
l'Enclos and her circle/ for the rest of his life. 
He used to complain of his Polish chivalry, 
that there was no solidity in them ; nothing but 
outside glitter, with tumult and anarchic 
noise; fatal want of one essential talent, the 
talent of obeying; and has been heard to pro- 
phesy that a glorious Republic, persisting in 
such courses would arrive at results which 
would surprise it. 

"Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm 
figures in the world; public men watching his 
procedure; kings anxious to secure him — 
Dutch print-sellers sticking up his portraits for 
a hero-worshipping public. Fighting hero, 
had the public known it, was not his essential 
character, though he had to fight a great deal. 
He was essentially an industrial man ; great 
in organizing, regulating, in constraining 
chaotic heaps to become cosmic for him. He 
drains bogs, settles colonies in the waste 



238 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

places of his dominion, cuts canals; unweari- 
edly encourages trade and work. The 
Friedrich Wilhelm's Canal, which still carries 
tonnage from the Oder to the Spree, is a monu- 
ment of his zeal in this way ; creditable with 
the means he had. To the poor French Protes- 
tants in the Edict-of-Nantes affair, he was like 
an express benefit of Heaven; one helper 
appointed to whom the help itself was profit- 
able. He munificently welcomed them to 
Brandenburg ; showed really a noble piety and 
human pity, as well as judgment; nor did 
Brandenburg and he want their reward. Some 
20,000 nimble French souls, evidently of the 
best French quality, found a home there; 
made 'waste sands about Berlin into potherb 
gardens;' and in spiritual Brandenburg, too, 
did something of horticulture which is still 
noticeable. " 

Now read carefully the description of the 
man, p. 352 (224-5) 5 the story of the battle of 
Fehrbellin, "the Marathon of Brandenburg/' 
p. 354 (225); and of the winter campaign of 
1679, p. 356 (227), beginning with its week's 
marches at sixty miles a day;- his wife, as 
always, being with him : 

"Louisa, honest and loving Dutch girl, aunt 
to our William of Orange, who trimmed up 
her own 'Orange-burg' (country-house), 
twenty miles north of Berlin, into a little jewel 
of the Dutch type, potherb gardens, training- 
schools, for young girls, and the like, a favor- 
ite abode of hers when she was at liberty for 



THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 239 

recreation. But her life was busy and ear- 
nest ; she was helpmate, not in name only, to 
an ever busy man. They were married young ; 
a marriage of love withal. Young Friedrich 
Wilhelm's courtship; wedding in Holland; 
the honest, trustful walk and conversation of 
the two sovereign spouses, their journeyings 
together, their mutual hopes, fears, and mani- 
fold vicissitudes, till death, with stern beauty, 
shut it in ; all is human, true, and wholesome 
in it, interesting to look upon, and rare among 
sovereign persons. ' ' 

Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before 
her husband, who married again — (little to his 
contentment) — died in 1688; and Louisa's 
second son, Friedrich, ten years old at his 
mother's death, and now therefore thirty-one, 
succeeds, becoming afterward Friedrich I. of 
Prussia. 

And here we pause on two great questions. 
Prussia is assuredly at this point a happier and 
better country than it was when inhabited by 
Wends. But is Friedrich I. a happier and bet- 
ter man than Henry the Fowler? Have all 
these kings thus improved their country, but 
never themselves? Is this somewhat expen- 
sive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich I., but- 
toned in diamonds, indeed the best that Protes- 
tantism can produce, as against Fowlers, 
Bears, and Red Beards? Much more, Frie- 
drich Wilhelm, orthodox on predestination; 
most of all, his less orthodox son ; — have we, 
in these, the highest results which Dr. Martin 



240 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Luther can produce for the present, in the 
first circles of society? And if not, how is it 
that the country, having gained so much in in- 
telligence and strength, lies more passively in 
their power than the baser country did under 
that of nobler men? 

These, and collateral questions, I mean to 
work out as I can, with Carlyle's good help;— 
but must pause for this time; in doubt, as 
heretofore. Only of this one thing I doubt 
not, that the name of all great kings, set over 
Christian nations, must at last be, in fulfill- 
ment, the hereditary one of these German 
princes, "Rich in Peace;" and that their coro- 
nation will be with Wild Olive, not with gold. 



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WORKS OF 

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POEMS OP PASSION. 12mo, cloth, $1 .00. Presentation 
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POEMS OF PASSION. Quarto, cloth. Illustrated 
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POEMS OF PASSION. Pocket Edition, Illustrated— 16mo. 

cloth, 75 cents; full morocco, gold edges, $2.50. 

Human nature is less of a mystery after the reading of this book. 

"Only a woman of genius could produce such a remarkable 
work."— Illust rated London News. 

MAURINE AND OTHER POEMS. 12mo. cloth, $1.00. 
Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. 
Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50- 
Beautiful thoughts and healthy inspiration in every line. 
"Maurine is an ideal poem about a perfect womau."-Tft€ South* 

POEMS OF PLEASURE. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presenta- 
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tion Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 
These poems make life doubly sweet and cheerful. 
"Mrs. Wilcox is an artist with a touch that reminds one of 

Lord Byron's impassionate strains."— Paris Register. 

THREE WOMEN. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation 
Edition — art binding, gold top, boxed, $1.50. 

Her latest and greatest poem. This marvelous narrative of 
thrilling interest depicts the lives of three good and beautiful 
women in every phase of weakness, passion, pride, love, sympathy 
and tenderness. 

AN AMBITIOUS MAN. (Prose.) 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 

"Vivid realism stands forth from every page of this fascinating 
book."— Every Day, 



WORKS OF ELM WHEELER W ILCOX (Continued) 

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top, $1.50. Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top, 
$2.50. 

A choice collection of recitations, specially compiled for read- 
ers and impersonators. 

"Her name is a household word. Her great power lies in depict- 
ing human emotions ; and in handling that grandest of all passions 
— love— she wields the pen of a master." — The Saturday Record. 

CUSTER AND OTHER POEMS. Handsomely illustrated. 
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A grand epic of the exploits and massacre of the immortal 
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"One cannot help gaining new impetus for the spiritual exist- 
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and emotions as this rarely gifted poetess -voices in magnificent 
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"Power and pathos characterize this magnificent poem. A 
deep understanding of life and an intense sympathy are beauti- 
fully expressed."— Tribune. 

MEN, WOMEN AND EMOTIONS. (Prose.) 12mo, heavy 
enameled paper cover, 50 cents ; English cloth, $1.00. 
A skillful analysis of social habits, customs and follies. 
"Her fame has reached all parts of the world, and her popular- 
ity seems to grow with each succeeding year."— American Newsman. 

THE BEAUTIFUL LAND OF NOD. (Poems, songs and 

stories.) With over sixty original illustrations. Quarto, 

cloth, $1.00. 

The delight of the nursery. A charming mother's book. 

"The foremost baby's book of the world."— New Orleans 
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